I got excited. It was my
country. I looked through the window [of the airplane] and I said this is
Russia. This is where I was born. This is where I grew up. I never thought I
would have this kind of thrill, this kind of nostalgia, this remembrance of
things past. All educated Russians have certain things in their blood that
never vanish. We grew up reading Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. We all,
and not only musicians, have Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin
in our ears. This was what I was going back to, and it evoked memories. Even
pride in old Mother Russia it evoked.

On April 20, 1986, the wheel came full
circle for Vladimir Horowitz with an audible click, and he recognized it as
such. His life, as he later said, was “now completely rounded out.”

The man generally considered the
world’s greatest pianist, the archetype of Romanticism, the most electrifying
pianist of his time, the last great direct descendant of the old Russian school
of piano playing, the virtuoso supreme, on that date appeared on a Russian
stage after an absence of sixty-one years.

But a few days before his appearance
at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory he had gone through another
powerful emotional experience. Shortly after his arrival in Moscow, Horowitz
told the authorities that he wanted to visit Scriabin’s house. For that he had
deep-rooted reasons. His uncle Alexander from Kharkov had alerted Scriabin in
1914 about a promising youngster in Kiev who was on his way to becoming a great
pianist. So when Scriabin gave a concert in Kiev, Uncle Alexander arranged for
his eleven-year-old nephew, Volodya, to meet with the great pianist-composer.
They had a short visit. As Horowitz remembered it:

Scriabin must have hated
the experience. He had to listen to me only a few hours before his concert. He was
short, elegant, and nervous. He was going to play two of his difficult late
sonatas in a few hours, and he could not have been very interested in a little
Jewish boy from Kiev. I played for him a Chopin waltz, the Melodie by Paderewski, and Borodin’s Au couvent. Perhaps he was polite and did not want to talk about my
playing. Instead he said that I should grow up to be a cultured man. There were
many pianists, he said, but very few of them were cultured.

Scriabin’s words remained in
Horowitz’s mind all his life. And Horowitz adored Scriabin’s music, recorded a
fair amount of it, and played it better than anybody else. So a pilgrimage to
the Scriabin Museum, which was also the house in which Scriabin had lived, was
high on Horowitz’s list of priorities.

The Russians said yes, of course, but
wait a day or two. What Horowitz did not know was that the building had been
neglected. A crew of painters and workmen was rushed to 11 Vakhtangov Street
and two rooms were put into passable shape. When Horowitz arrived at this
Potemkin Village the paint was still wet, although he was so thrilled to be in
the Scriabin’s ambience he did not notice it.

[…]

The visit, said Gelb [Peter Gelb, VH’s
producer], left Horowitz “visibly moved.” Another segment of his past, one that
meant a great deal to him, had activated his memory bank.

Most Russians had no memory bank at
all when it came to Vladimir Horowitz. Sixty-one years is a long time. Nevertheless
the Russians were in a state close to hysteria when the announcement was made
that Horowitz would be giving a concert in the Great Hall of the Moscow
Conservatory. If Horowitz was an overwhelming presence in the West, he was
sheer myth in Russia. Russian musicians, of course, knew what he represented –
Romanticism incarnate, harnessed to incredible fingers – but very few had
actually heard him. For decades he had played only in America.

When it was learned that Horowitz was
coming to Moscow, there was, as the Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman [b. 1952]
described it, “a sort of insanity. I don’t ever remember such excitement for
any musician who played there.” To pianists of Feltsman’s generation, Horowitz was
“a sort of antique hero, something from mythology.” Feltsman’s teacher at the
Moscow Conservatory, Jacob Flier, was a Horowitz admirer who had managed to
collect some of his recordings, and Flier made his class listen to them. Now
the antique hero could be heard in person.

There also was something else in the
mind of some Russian pianists – a show-me attitude. Russia was not entirely
divorced from the intellectual life of the world, and the pianists there had
heard that Horowitz had the reputation in certain circles of being all fingers
and no brain. Thus there were those Russian musicians prepared in advance to
dismiss him as a superficial virtuoso. The others, who desperately wanted him to live up to his reputation
– after all, he was the legendary Russian pianist Horowitz – were worried.
Could an eighty-three-year-old musician possibly do so? And if by now Horowitz
had no technique left, what else could he possibly offer? Could he certify his
standing as a legend?

So when Horowitz stepped on the stage
of the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the event was much more than a
mere piano recital. A mighty figure had returned; and more, a Russian who had conquered the world. And
he still was one of their own, even after sixty-one years. There was an
outpouring of love and pride from the audience, captured eternally on the
videocassette made of the concert.

In a way it was a sort of miracle that
Horowitz played in Russia at all. His appearance had been preceded by some
high-level negotiations involving the United States and Russia, the State
Department and the Politburo, President Reagan and Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev. The
two superpowers had not had a cultural exchange since the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, and there still was considerable tension between them.

And at the beginning of the
negotiations there was also Vladimir Horowitz to deal with – the temperamental
Horowitz with his demands for all the amenities when on tour, with his
financial arrangements, with his piano, with his entourage. He expected certain
niceties and would not travel unless he was sure they would be forthcoming. As
things turned out, it took the combined resources of several governments to
make him happy.

But as far as Horowitz was concerned,
the time was right. He had gone through a terrible period during 1983 and 1984,
when he had to overcome psychological and physical ills and the wreck of one of
the great techniques in pianistic history. Nobody thought he would ever play
again. But he pulled through, started practicing, found that his skills had
returned, and he reentered the world. Early in 1985 he had given concerts in
London and Milan[1] for the first time in
decades. The recitals were a huge success, he was greeted as myth come to life,
and he felt that he had played well.

[…]

Thus he was feeling euphoric in 1985,
and when his manager, Peter Gelb, proposed the return to Russia, Horowitz did
not need much urging. But he immediately set a condition. As on his return to
England [May 1982], where his sponsor had been Prince Charles, he would not go
to Russia unless he was invited by the government. The financial aspect was
also important. If Horowitz never did things only for money, he expected a good return when he did play.

Horowitz had said for many years that
he would never go back to Russia. “We all say things, only to live long enough
to discover that people and events can make a person change his mind,” said
Horowitz, discussing his trip in 1987. Glasnost,
perestroika, the new wave of
liberalism sweeping over the Soviet Union, the change in the climate between
the two superpowers – all these factors, said Horowitz, entered into his decision
to go.

He also thought about his family, the
little that was left of it. His mother had died in 1930 and his father in a
gulag in the late thirties. Jacob, Horowitz’s eldest brother, had died during
the Revolution in the early 1920s. He had left a child who had a son, who in
turn had a son who attended the Horowitz Moscow concert. George, the other
elder brother, had died during World War II. Vladimir’s sister, Regina, who was
always called Genya and was three years older than he, had died in 1984. It is
not generally known that in February 1975, Horowitz tried to get Genya to the
United States for a three-month visit. He filled out all the requisite papers
and made applications to the State Department, but the Russians would not
cooperate. The only way Horowitz could keep in touch with her was by phone. There
was a daughter from Genya’s first marriage, Yelena Dolberg, who was nine years
old when Horowitz left Russia. Now she was seventy.

[…]

Two days before the April 20 recital
at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, which seats about 1,700, he
played an open rehearsal there, a tryout to gauge the hall and go through the
program. The concert was supposed to be exclusively for students. But many of
the tickets were seized by the conservatory faculty, and by bureaucrats and
politicians with connections. There was no advertising, no official recognition
of the Horowitz presence, but in Russia word of mouth had been refined to a
high art and everybody knew about the advance concert. Many students crashed
the hall, breaking through the police barriers and invading the premises. Things
like that just did not happen in the Soviet Union in those days. Horowitz, when
he was later told about it, was pleased and touched, and hoped none of the kids
got into trouble.

[…]

Feltsman was in the audience. The
first thing that struck him when Horowitz started to play – it was a Scarlatti
sonata – was the Horowitz sound:

It took me half a minute or
a minute to adjust my ears. The sound was very, very soft, very gentle, very
piano, very beautiful. I can tell you that I have never heard in that hall,
where many major artists played, this sort of sound. Fragile, floating, very
sad. It was indescribable. Some of us pianists are good technicians, some of us
are good musicians, but very few have this magical touch where the sound is
floating. He had it. He had it as probably nobody else. It was physically,
almost unbearably beautiful when he played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G sharp
minor. The last section, where there is the theme in the left hand, he crossed
over and hit that D sharp, where he kept it floating for about half an hour. It
was a real miracle, absolutely a miracle. Technically there were a few little
mixups, but that was beside the point. I didn’t care how many wrong notes he
played – there weren’t many – because the playing was so beautiful. Such a
unique, magic touch, this unique floating sound, I have never heard from any
piano player in my life.

Feltsman came away from the concert
with changed ideas about Horowitz. He too had heard from some of his colleagues
that Horowitz was nothing but an acrobat with fingers. After this concert he
knew they were wrong. “I could not agree with those who had said that Horowitz
was a great piano player but a lousy musician.”

After the rehearsal Feltsman and many
other musicians went backstage. […] “Tell me, tell me, how did it sound?” asked
Horowitz.

Of course [Feltsman said] we
spoke Russian. He spoke exquisite Russian. He wanted to know if the acoustics
were all right. He asked me if I knew how old he was. “Yes, Maestro, I know how
old you are. But I can assure you that your piano playing even at your age is
much better than all of us youngsters put together multiplied by then.”

Horowitz beamed.

The next day Donna Hartman, the
ambassador’s wife, telephoned Feltsman. Could he come right over? Horowitz, she
said, wanted to see him. Feltsman said that he never moved so fast in his life.
He was at Spasso House “with the speed of a nuclear missile.” He and Horowitz
spent about three hours talking, mostly about music. Finally Horowitz said that
he had to take his nap, but first would Feltsman like to play something? Feltsman
said that since there was so little time, perhaps Horowitz would like to play?
“With pleasure,” Horowitz said, and played Chopin’s A minor Mazurka from the
Op. 17 set, the Liszt Consolation in
D flat [No. 4], and then looked through a pile of music and picked out the
Schubert-Liszt Ständchen[2]. This he played
from the printed notes, Feltsman turning pages for him.

“It was divine,” Feltsman said. “I was watching his hands. I noticed that
he was motionless. His face was serious and tense, like a mask. This was total
concentration. His technique was very peculiar, and I don’t think that anybody
could copy it. He was playing only from elbow to finger. The shoulder never
moved. Flat fingers, as we all know.”

Feltsman was an accurate observer.
Horowitz never used much shoulder motion. “I never take chords from the
shoulder,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s like a boxer. When he boxes from
far away, he loses power. Good boxers cut short. When you play like that, the
sound is pleasant and full. You can hear every chord and every note equally. It’s
never hard – just like an organ chord.” Horowitz loved to watch prizefights on
television and considered himself an authority on boxing.

A single poster on the wall of the
Moscow Conservatory was the only announcement of the official concert on April
20, 1986. The poster said, merely, VLADIMIR HOROWITZ, USA. The hall was, of
course, packed for Horowitz’s first official Russian appearance since 1925. Only
about four hundred tickets were put on sale, at eight dollars; the rest of the
seats were reserved for dignitaries. But the state box used by Politburo
members was empty. Philip Taubman, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, cover the concert as a news
story. He explained that the box was empty because top government and party
leaders would have considered it inappropriate to attend a recital by an
American citizen after the United States air strike against Libya, a Soviet
ally. At this concert, as at the rehearsal, about two hundred students stormed
the hall and managed to get in.

The April 20 program had to be
specially arranged because it was being televised by a CBS crew for the program
Vladimir Horowitz in Moscow, carried
in America on the CBS Sunday Morning
show. It was a rather light program. Horowitz did not play Schumann’s Kreisleriana (which he did play in
Leningrad), because he thought it was “too long and intellectual” for a
worldwide television audience.[3]

[…]

After the concert Horowitz was visited
by his niece, Yelena Dolberg, the daughter of his sister. She told him that the
concert was wonderful, and that she also had been at his last recital in
Moscow, which was in 1925. Horowitz said that he probably played better now.

[…]

Feltsman was at the concert. Horowitz
had played the same program as at the rehearsal, and the thing that most struck
Feltsman was that he played it very differently. Some things were better than
at the rehearsal, others he thought not so good. “It was the same program but a
different concert.”

Several days later he and Horowitz met
at a party. “Now,” Horowitz said, “tell me the truth. What did you think?”

Feltsman told him he liked it very much
but that the second concert was completely different than the first.

“It’s always like that,” Horowitz
said. “It’s supposed to be like that.
I cannot play always the same way.” Then he went into detail about why his
ideas had changed and how he went about this particular concert. It became
“crystal clear” to Feltsman after this conversation that the often-expressed
opinion about Horowitz, that he was nothing but a virtuoso, “a kid genius who
is playing by intuition, and has no mental concept about what he is doing,” was
all wrong. “Deeply wrong. He knew exactly what he had done differently, and
why. He could analyze his playing. It was not a matter of his mood. I was very
impressed, because this myth which is very common even now was simply not true.”

[…]

Taubman, who followed Horowitz to
Leningrad, wrote that even more than in Moscow “this was clearly an emotional
homecoming for the Russian-born pianist.” Horowitz, he thought, “played with a
passion and a flair that seemed inspired in part by a renewal of affection for
the city.” He quoted Horowitz as saying, “For me, Leningrad is like home.”
Leningrad always had been Horowitz’s favorite Russian city. It was there that
he had played a mammoth series of twenty programs in the 1924–25 season,
becoming a hero of the Leningrad music-loving public and an object of awe to
his colleagues. It was also still the most beautiful city in the Soviet Union, even
in its shabby 1986 condition. In addition Horowitz loved Philharmonic Hall, the
concert hall in the Winter Palace, both for its tradition (nearly every major
musician since the early 1800s had performed there) and its acoustics.

As in Moscow, the concert left many in
tears. Again as in Moscow, students crashed the hall, and those who could not
get in were seen peering through windows and skylights. After the concert,
which he played on April 27, an old woman came up to tell him how much she had
liked the recital. She was the daughter of Rimsky-Korsakov.

For the Leningrad program Horowitz substituted
Schumann’s Kreisleriana for the
Mozart Sonata. Otherwise the program was a duplicate of the Moscow one, but it
was the lengthy Schumann that made the Leningrad affair much more imposing. Horowitz
later said that the Moscow program had been “political,” which was his way of
saying that it had been put together for television.

Did Horowitz feel a special kind of
pressure in the Russian concerts? He said that he did not. In Russia, he said,
he suddenly felt like a Russian. It was noted that he started speaking in
Russian even to Americans. There was a sixty-one-year retrogression. Suddenly
Horowitz was cast back in time and started reliving his youth. He described his
feelings on his return to New York:

What was fantastic was that
after sixty years without contact with the Russians, everybody still knew my
name. Not only pianists came to the concerts. The public was anxious to hear
me. When I walked out I was not nervous at all. I felt as though I was home. It
felt like home. I wasn’t worried about having a success, not having a success.
I was home, and at home everybody loves you. I felt also like an ambassador of
peace from America to Russia. In Moscow I was not nervous, no. I was more
nervous in Leningrad. Nerves often help you to focus your energy. The program
in Leningrad was better – less political, more demanding. Maybe that’s why I
played better in Leningrad than I had in Moscow.[4]
Also the hall in Leningrad has better acoustics than the Great Hall of the
Conservatory in Moscow. Leningrad has the best hall in Europe, I think. It is
in the Winter Palace, originally the ballroom of Catherine the Great. Everybody
was heard there. Berlioz was there, Wagner, Clara Schumann, Anton Rubinstein. I
also felt that I had a warmer reception playing there than in Moscow. Moscow is
like New York, it has many nationalities in it. People come from everywhere. But
Leningrad is more Russian. I would go tomorrow to Leningrad if I was invited.

In Russia I recognized my
Russian heritage. I am a Russian pianist, born in the Ukraine and a student at
the Kiev Conservatory there. Thus I like to think that my playing and my
musicianship reflect a Russian tradition. Once a critic in America said that my
playing, my style, was in the Anton Rubinstein tradition. I think he was
correct. Josef Hofmann, the most famous of the Rubinstein pupils, heard me play
one of the Liszt Petrach Sonnets and
said to me, “You know, I think my teacher would have liked your pedaling.”

[…]

Politically Horowitz never had any
love for the Russian system, but he did not find things as bad there as he had
been led to believe. When he asked his relatives about conditions in Russia, they
told him that they were very well off. One was an engineer, the other a
mathematician, so Horowitz figured out that perhaps they enjoyed special
privileges. Or perhaps they did not feel free to say all the things that were
on their minds, and he did not press them. He knew that it could be dangerous for
Soviet citizens at that time to criticize their country.

In Russia, Horowitz went to the opera,
to the ballet, to the museums, to Tchaikovsky’s house in Klin, to Scriabin’s
house. In Klin he played on Tchaikovsky’s piano. “Tchaikovsky composed the Dumka on it. I was given a facsimile of
Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. In
the manuscript score he marked the last movement andante, not adagio the way
conductors today play it.”

He had been to all those places before
leaving Russia, but did not remember them and was happy to renew acquaintance. “I
was too young for it to mean much to me. When you’re twenty-two you’re not
impressed with those things.” He met many pianists, conductors, and spent some
hours with Dmitri Kabalevsky, whose music Horowitz had played with considerable
success in America in the 1940s. Horowitz was fascinated with the cemetery in
Leningrad. “First is Tchaikovsky, then Anton Rubinstein, then there’s Borodin,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky. Just like that. At the end are Dostoevsky, Pushkin,
Stassov. Everybody is there.”

Horowitz did not live long enough to
follow the amazing weeks of late November 1989, when the Soviet System suddenly
went to pieces, much less the staggering events of 1991, when communism died. He
would especially have been pleased when Leningrad once again became St.
Petersburg. The observation he made on his return home was short and pithy: “People
are a bit down, and life is hard, but now Gorbachev is trying to make some better
life there for the people. They deserve it. They have suffered very much, the
Russians.”

2. Growing Up
in Kiev

When I was young I spent
much time playing operas. I was in love with opera and with singing. I didn’t
play Bach, I didn’t play Mozart or Scarlatti at that time. Operas only. When I
was twelve, thirteen, I was playing operas of Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky,
Wagner. By that time I was really a very good sight reader. So I could play
almost anything. But not scores. That I am not so good with. But piano
reductions of operas and symphonies, those were easy for me.

– Vladimir Horowitz, about his
childhood

Vladimir Horowitz grew up in Kiev,
studied there, and gave his first recital there.

[…]

By the age of seven or so most
prodigies are well into the mysteries of playing and, in some cases, composing.
All great performing musicians have to start very early. After the age of six
it may be too late; the reflexes for virtuoso piano and violin playing have to
be trained in babyhood. In the entire history of piano and violin playing it is
hard to think of an important artist whose ability did not reveal itself by the
age of six.

Horowitz always maintained that,
unlike most of the world’s great pianists from Mozart on, he had never been a
child prodigy. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Josef Hofmann, Leopold Godowsky, Ferruccio
Busoni, and many other of the superpianists, he pointed out, were playing at the
age of four, and their styles, in effect, had been fully formed by the time
they were fifteen. At that age they were also veterans of the concert stage. Horowitz
claimed that he started “late, around five.” He conceded that by ten he thought
he had “some talent,” and that he was “a not so bad sight reader.” (From
Horowitz, “not so bad” meant mildly stupendous.) He claimed that he never
practiced very much, which may or may not have been true. Many pianists like to
pretend that they never practice. This is a form of professional machismo. But
it is a fact that as a young pianist Horowitz was compulsively reading through
the piano literature and opera scores instead of practicing his scales.

Yet in claiming that he had never been
a prodigy, Horowitz was being a little disingenuous. The only reason he wasn’t
immediately recognized as a prodigy was the fact that the public did not know
about him. His family was wealthy enough to avoid pushing their brilliant child
or exploiting his extraordinary gifts.

The literature on prodigies is small.
Psychologists have not been able to explain the phenomenon. But some children
are born with an order of musical reflex that sets them apart. They usually
have absolute pitch, the ability to name any note or combination of notes on
hearing them. When they approach the piano at the age of two, when most
children bang around aimlessly, they try to pick out concords and play little
tunes. Their hearing is unusually acute. They have a tendency to move ahead
faster than their mentors can teach them. They have amazing memories, to the
point where they can hear a long piece of music two or three times and
reproduce it on their instrument without ever having looked at the printed
notes. Then they carry it in their heads for the rest of their lives. Little
Volodya was typical of the species.

Not all prodigies develop into great
performing artists, but on the other hand one cannot become a great performing
artist without having been a prodigy. Horowitz certainly met all of the
qualifications, and everybody who came into contact with him as a child or
young man knew it. Sergei Tarnowski, his second teacher at the Kiev
Conservatory, said that if Horowitz had not been a child prodigy, “then there
never had been such a thing.” Horowitz amazed him with the rapidity with which
he learned new pieces, with his phenomenal ear and his sight-reading ability. The
boy stunned his teacher when he reproduced sections of operas and symphonies by
ear, after hearing them performed only once.

But for all of this talent there is
usually a price to pay. A by-product of being a child prodigy is often a
one-sided attitude toward life. Prodigies, especially musical prodigies, start
honing their gifts as little more than babies – sometimes as babies – and devote the rest of their lives to a ferocious
discipline, a strenuous development of those gifts to the exclusion of almost
everything else. The result can be a warped childhood, monomania, and a lack of
general education. Prodigies are supremely gifted in their particular
discipline but frequently unworldly outside of it. What else can one expect
from a pianist or violinist who starts practicing perhaps an hour or so a day
at the age of three or four, three hours a day at the age of five, five hours a
day at nine or ten, and frequently six or more for the rest of his life?

[…]

Looking back, Horowitz grudgingly
conceded that he would have given any teacher trouble. From the beginning he
was going to do things his own way. No wonder they got angry at him, and
Horowitz in his old age understood their problems. “I suppose that it was true
that I banged a lot,” he said some seventy years later.

Horowitz grew up musically in what he
considered “the Russian style” as practiced by Rubinstein. “Anton Rubinstein
was very free in his style, and his was the tradition I grew up with. The idea
was that you were supposed to know everything about your instrument, then
everything in music, as much as you could learn, and then form your own
personality. Rubinstein was a very free pianist, never mechanical.” Horowitz
developed along the same lines; he always was the exponent of instinct over
mechanical skill. “If you grow up playing only Kalkbrenner, Henselt, and Czerny
etudes,” Horowitz said, “you will never become a pianist. Never. Impossible. You
must know the great music from the beginning, be saturated with it. I never wanted
to work only on technique.” To the end of his life, he never worked on
traditional technique. No scales for him. His technique came out of the great music
he played and certain finger exercises, derived from the music itself, that he
devised.

[…]

Although many of the world’s major
recitalists came to Kiev, Horowitz heard surprisingly few pianists on the
concert stage when he was young. But he did go to a few concerts while still a
student. Naturally he went to hear Josef Hofmann when the great Polish-born
pianist played in Kiev. Hofmann was the idol of the Russian public, and many
considered him the greatest living pianist. But Horowitz was disappointed.
“Hofmann did not impress me very much. Of course he was a great pianist with
incredible facility, but I did not like his interpretations. I was bored. Later
on, in America, I heard him many times and had no reason to change my initial
impression.”

Of the pianists he remembered,
Rachmaninoff made the strongest impression. “With Rachmaninoff I had an
immediate identification. He gave a concert of his own music that I heard when
I was nine or ten. I also was playing his music at that time. He was singing on the piano all the time.”

While Rachmaninoff was in Kiev,
Volodya’s mother made an appointment for her son to play for him at his hotel. But
when the Horowitz family arrived they were told he had left. “He didn’t want to
listen to some young pianist he had not heard anything about. I reminded him of
this when we became friends,” said Horowitz.

But, Horowitz said, the musician who
made more of an impression on him than anybody else was not a pianist. He heard
one of Fritz Kreisler’s violin recitals “and he was fantastic. I did not sleep
nights after I heard him, and I wanted to make that kind of sound on the piano.”

3.
Novorossiisk, Taganrog, Gomel, Batumi

[…]

In his later conservatory years,
Horowitz developed a passion for Grieg and played many of the Lyric Pieces and the Ballade. “I simply
loved Grieg. Also Chopin and Schumann, of course. I went through all their
music. The Liszt transcriptions went easily. I never had much trouble
memorizing music like that. Once the forms and the textures were in the mind,
the rest was easy. Memorizing the classical composers was much harder.” Grieg
must have been an adolescent crush. There is no record of Horowitz playing any
Grieg during his professional career.

[…]

With the arrival of the Communists, the
once-happy and prosperous Horowitz family was shattered. Jacob, Volodya’s
eldest brother, was drafted into the army and died during the Revolution. George
became a drifter who settled for a while in Leningrad. Samuel’s business was seized
by the state, and he was forced into a dull bureaucratic job.

During all this terror, Volodya was in
his last year at the Kiev Conservatory, preparing for his final examinations.
For his graduation recital in 1920 Horowitz played the Bach-Busoni Toccata,
Adagio and Fugue in C; the Mozart Gigue in G; a Beethoven sonata (Horowitz
forgot whether it was the Appassionata
or Op. 110); Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes;
the Rachmaninoff B flat minor Sonata; Chopin’s F minor Fantasy; “and something
modern, I don’t remember.” He ended with the Mozart-Liszt DonJuan and said that
after he had finished it the jury stood up to express its approval. That had
never happened before in the entire history of the conservatory, he said.

For his required concerto he chose the
Rachmaninoff Third. For his chamber-music pieces he selected the Schumann
Quintet and Schubert’s Winterreise. The
concerts were tremendous successes. An elated Blumenfeld wrote to Rachmaninoff
in New York about his talented pupil and the brilliant success he had had with
Rachmaninoff’s music.

That was the end of Volodya’s studies.
Now he was on his own.

Or he would have been had he not had
his family to worry about. Now, at the age of seventeen, he had to start his
professional career if only to become a breadwinner. Filial obligations forced
him to face the public perhaps sooner than he would have wished.

[…]

Horowitz gave his first public concert
in Kiev on May 30, 1921. At the debut, Horowitz said, there were not many in
the hall. That state of affairs would not last long. Vladimir Horowitz had all of
the ingredients for stardom. It was not only his pianistic skill. Perhaps
equally important, he made a striking appearance on stage. He looked like the
kind of pianist a romantic novelist would have invented. He was slim and
handsome, with a pale complexion and a profile that suggested Chopin’s. He wore
his hair long and curly. His hands were beautiful. He dressed impeccably; from
the beginning he was a dandy. Many years later Horowitz, looking at one of his
photographs from those days, grinned and said, “I was very esthetic.”

[…]

Shortly after the beginning of his
career Horowitz made a friend who was to be close to him for the rest of his
long life – Nathan Milstein, whom Horowitz met in 1922.

Milstein was then eighteen and a prodigiously
gifted violinist. He came from Odessa (a city that spawned an unusual number of
musically gifted Jewish children who subsequently went on to great careers as
pianists and violinists), had studied with Peter Stolyarsky and then with the
great Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg. Auer, a Joachim pupil who had been born
in Hungary in 1845, had a successful recital career and then became the most
important violin teacher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
his pupils, among them Jascha Heifetz,
Efrem Zimbalist, and Mischa Elman, were the equivalent of the Liszt and
Leschetizky pupils on the piano.

Milstein was concretizing through
Russia in 1922. In Kharkov he met Horowitz’s uncle, who raved about his
brilliant nephew. When Milstein went to Kiev to play several concerts at the
conservatory with Horowitz’s former teacher Tarnowsky at the piano, Horowitz
and Genya went to all the recitals, visited him backstage after the first one,
and invited him home for tea. He stayed for dinner. After the second recital he
was invited to stay with the Horowitzes. “You could say,” Milstein wrote in his
chatty but sometimes inaccurate autobiography, From Russia to the West, “I came to tea and stayed three years.”

On their very first night together
there was, of course, music.

“Genya and Volodya played for me,”
Milstein remembered many years later. “She played Schumann, Liszt, Chopin
ballades. But Volodya played only his own Wagner transcriptions for me. He had
never written them down. He played the ‘Forging Song’ from Siegfried, unbelievable. He could play Götterdämmerung by heart. He was like a tiger. I was terribly
impressed.” Thus began a friendship that would continue for the rest of
Horowitz’s life.

[…]

Milstein and Horowitz read through a
good deal of the violin literature. They started to give concerts together. Indeed,
writes Milstein in his autobiography, they gave a concert in the hall of the
Kiev Merchant Guild ten days after they met. They were a great contrast: the
shy, introverted, poetic-looking Horowitz with his resplendent coiffure, and
the shorter, extroverted, happy-go-lucky, close-cropped Milstein. What they had
in common was a supreme command of their instruments.

[…]

Looking back, Milstein said that the most
remarkable thing about their joint musical appearances was that they never
bothered to rehearse. They were musicians who thought alike and worked together
with such rapport that they immediately “synthesized” the concert. “Volodya was
absolutely out of this world. Rehearsals were not necessary. We had such
spontaneity on stage. We had a contact, a spiritual contact. And he was such a
wonderful sight reader, almost as good as Rachmaninoff.”

[…]

At first Horowitz and Milstein booked
their own concerts, in which they were helped by Uncle Alexander in Kharkov. Later
the state stepped in. An organization called Muzo-Narkompros, known as MUZO,
began to establish full supervision over all of the musical life of the Soviet
Union. Artists were required to get MUZO’s permission for all concert tours.
MUZO also engaged and booked artist on its own.

For two years MUZO sent Horowitz and
Milstein all over the country to play for workers and peasants, most of whom
could not have cared less about going to concerts. Years later, Horowitz
laughed at the recollection. It was obvious that nobody in the audiences had
ever been to a concert. They were bored and restless and could not wait to get
out of the hall.

“We went to Poltava, Gomel, Kharkov,
Ekaterinodar, Simferopol, and Sevastopol. We were in Taganrog, Novorossiisk, and
Nakhichevan. We appeared in the Caucasus, in Batumi, Tiflis, and Baku. There
were interesting trips to Saratov and the Tatar Republic,” wrote Milstein.

[…]

Horowitz owed his Moscow orchestral
debut to his father, who in 1923 went to the Auer pupil Lev Zeitlin, an old
friend who was the concertmaster of Persimfans in Moscow. According to Volodya,
Samuel said, “I have a son and if you engage him he will be very famous, and
you can believe me.”

Persimfans, an acronym for First
Symphonic Ensemble[5], was the only orchestra of
its kind. It was a full symphony orchestra, more than eighty players, without a
conductor – a Communist experiment in collectivism. The players sat in a circle
and watched Zeitlin, who gave the downbeat and started them off. Horowitz
played the Rachmaninoff Third with them and said it was a very good
performance. Milstein shared the program with Horowitz, playing the Glazunov
Concerto. When Darius Milhaud visited the Soviet Union he heard the orchestra
and said it was very good, but wryly added, “a conductor would have achieved
the same results, no doubt a little faster.”

[…]

Horowitz made a tremendous impression
wherever he played and was soon being talked about as the most formidable
pianist of his generation. It was not only because of the incredible accuracy
of his pianistic mechanism but also because the playing far transcended
mechanics. Horowitz had the magic, and that cannot be taught. There was
something demonic in that tense figure at the keyboard, a suppressed force
waiting to be released, a high-voltage charge (even when he played softly) that
communicated itself to everybody in the audience. Gregory Ginsburg, for
instance, was an admired pianist at that time whose fingers matched that of
Horowitz, who was certainly at least as good a musician, who was motivated by
the highest ideals. But Ginsburg did not have the magic. Horowitz did. It was a
matter of temperament, of daring, of an alliance with the audience, of a new
kind of playing and an unmatched degree of personality and tonal imagination.

[…]

The climax of Horowitz’s career in the
Soviet Union came shortly before he left the country. In one season in
Leningrad, 1924–25, he played some twenty concerts with twenty programs to
wildly enthusiastic audiences.

This was a tribute to Horowitz’s
popularity, and there had not been anything like it since 1912, when Josef
Hofmann gave twenty-one consecutive concerts in St. Petersburg, playing 255
different works. Horowitz’s Leningrad recitals were the product of fast and
furious labor, he said:

I still don’t know how I
prepared those ten programs in so short a time. I certainly could not do it
today.

My Leningrad programs have
never been published outside of Russia. They are in the archives of the old St.
Petersburg Conservatory, now the Lenin Conservatory. Between October 15, 1924, and
January 18, 1925, I played those twenty concerts. Altogether there were
forty-four big works and sixty-six small works on the programs. The major Liszt
works were the B minor Sonata; the Spanish
Rhapsody; Mephisto Waltz; Funerailles; Tarantelle from Veneziae Napoli; the Don Juan, Nozze di Figaro, and other
transcriptions; and the First Piano Concerto. Of Schumann there were the C
major Fantasy, Symphonic Etudes, Carnaval, and the three Romances; Chopin – Ballades in G minor,
F, and F minor; the A flat Polonaise; the second and third sonatas; the
Barcarolle; the four scherzos; and the F minor Concerto; and of course selected
mazurkas, etudes, preludes, and waltzes. I was interested in Ravel in those
days and played the Sonatine and Alborada
del gracioso plus some smaller pieces.[6]
Rachmaninoff – piano concertos two and three plus small pieces. I played a good
deal of Medtner. I always played Bach-Busoni at that time, and on the programs
were toccatas and fugues; the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C; the Chaconne.

A search in Leningrad turned up only
the last program, which was played on January 18, 1925. Devoted to Chopin, it
contained the Ballade No. 2, two scherzos, a nocturne, six etudes, six
mazurkas, the Sonata in B flat minor, and the A flat Polonaise.

It is interesting that Horowitz
claimed to have played the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in his Leningrad
series. If his statement was correct – Horowitz could be unreliable – this
would be the only known public performance he ever gave of the work. Horowitz
once explained that he had never played it in America because during the climax of
the third movement, the piano has only neutral chords instead of a big display
involving the famous theme. Horowitz said he once asked Rachmaninoff, “If I
play it, can I double the orchestra’s theme on the piano?” Rachmaninoff looked
at him, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Nu,
Horowitz, do what you want.” In the 1950s Horowitz was talking with Victor
about recording the Second Concerto, but nothing came of it.[7]

[…]

About this time Horowitz made up his
mind to leave Russia. He and Milstein had, during the previous few years, spent
hours talking about making careers in the West. Like many musicians, they were
less than enchanted with Soviet ideology and the mess it had made of the
economy and the lives of the people. Horowitz’s father was an ever-present case
in point. Even when Horowitz was a student his friends, colleagues and teachers
had suggested that his future lay outside of Russia.

[…]

Things started to move when Horowitz
met an impresario named Alexander Merovitch, a Russian who had started a
concert bureau in Moscow. Merovitch was well aware of the potential that
Horowitz and Milstein represented. He had met them around 1923, Horowitz said,
and kept following them, cajoling them, promising great things if they played
in Berlin and other European capitals under his direction. A smooth talker,
Merovitch assured them that they would have a tremendous success. That helped
Horowitz, who was more impressionable and innocent than the skeptical and more
worldly Milstein, make up his mind. Finally he told Merovitch that he would go.
Another thing urging his departure was the dread possibility of his being
drafted. (The thought of Vladimir Horowitz as a soldier boggles the
imagination.)

Horowitz secured a visa to Germany on
the grounds that he needed to complete his studies with Arthur Schnabel in
Berlin. That was not true, but he had to give some reason and that sounded
convincing.

[…]

In September 1925 (Horowitz never
could remember the exact date), pianist and impresario took the steamship from
Leningrad to Bremen, en route to Berlin. Berlin, said Merovitch, was the only
city in Germany that really counted artistically or professionally. Merovitch
also started arranging for dates in Paris, a city that certainly had equal
stature with Berlin as one of the two artistic capitals of Europe. Horowitz had
British currency – £1,000, about $5,000 – in his shoes. That was the money put
aside for his first three concerts in Berlin. Milstein, who had some concert
dates in Russia to fulfill, was to follow soon after. Now the Merovitch concert
bureau had expanded to all of two musicians – but two such musicians any
impresario would commit murder to put under contract.

Horowitz was twenty-two years old.[8]
He never thought he would be away from Russia for a long time. Quite the
opposite. Deep down he had the feeling that he would not have the success that
Merovitch had promised. He had his backup plan figured out. “I had become very
popular in Russia, and if I would not have an equal success in Germany or
France I would go back to Russia where they liked me and where my family was.”

It was a quiet departure. Nobody from
the family came to Leningrad to see him off. If for no other reason, travel was
next to impossible those days. Volodya and his father had taken leave of each
other when he had played the Tchaikovsky and Chopin Concertos ten days before
the steamship to Bremen. Natasha [Saitzoff, VH’s cousin – Ed.] had previously managed
to leave Russia for studies in Europe. She later heard from the family that her
uncle Samuel and Merovitch had a long private session in Moscow. “Uncle Samuel
told Merovitch all about Volodya,” she said. “How temperamental and difficult
he was, and how to handle him.” After Volodya arrived in Germany there was
little contact between him and his family. It was not that he did not like his
parents. “He was as interested in family as much as he could be interested in
anybody but himself, and he really adored his mother,” Natasha said. “But his
career came first. Later on, when he was established, he corresponded with
them. He never lost touch.”

Horowitz, many years later, told
Samuel Chotzinoff that a Soviet guard at the border examined his papers and
passport, looked at him and said, “Do not please forget the motherland.” It
could have happened. It could also have been a romantic invention that Horowitz
made up.

4. A
Greenhorn in Berlin

I played a virtuoso program
in Berlin – Bach-Busoni, Liszt, and so on. Schnabel came backstage and was very
enthusiastic. But Schnabel told me he never played that kind of music. “I don’t
have the time,” he said. “I still don’t even know all of Bach.” I said to him,
“You know, Mr. Schnabel, I do just the opposite. First I play these things and
then I will have time for Bach.”

– Vladimir Horowitz, describing an
encounter with Artur Schnabel

Berlin in the mid-1920s was a sad,
bad, glad, mad city, striving to pull itself out of the terrible inflation that
had massacred the economy after World War I. But it had the most intellectually
stimulating life of any city in Europe except Paris and, musically, it was more
exciting than Paris. In the 1920s Berlin was the city of the Staatsoper, where
Erich Kleiber conducted the world premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1925. It was the city of the Kroll Opera, in which Otto
Klemperer conducted many premieres shortly after Horowitz arrived there; and
the city of the Städtische Oper headed by Bruno Walter. It was the cabaret city of
the Kurt Weil–Bertold Brecht Dreigroschenoper
and Mahagonny. Arnold Schoenberg,
Paul Hindemith, Max Planck, Oskar Kokoschka, Vassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann
lived and worked there. So did many great pianists. It was a city of superb
museums and symphony orchestras. It was an open, decadent city filled with
homosexuals, prostitutes, con men, and shady nouveau-riche industrialists. The
George Grosz drawings give an idea of the underside of Berlin in those years. To
a provincial like Vladimir Horowitz it was a revelation.

Horowitz looked, listened, and started
to work. There was one physical change. Merovitch decided that the curly locks Horowitz
shook in Russia had to go. They were attracting too much attention and derisory
laughter. Horowitz was given a close-cropped businessman’s haircut.

He spent three months practicing,
learning the language, and going to concerts and opera before making his Berlin
debut. For once in his life he was a constant concertgoer. He wanted to
understand what German music making was all about, what the German pianists
represented, how he stacked up against them and the international keyboard
celebrities who were always passing through Berlin.

[…]

Horowitz did not like the German
school of music making. He found German piano playing “pedantic, square,
boring,” heavy, hidebound, thick, too severe, lacking in color, metrically too
strict, obsessed with Seele (soul)
and metaphysics. He hated the kind of programs they often put together – the
last three Beethoven sonatas, the last three Schuberts. To Horowitz, this was
not program making, and his Russian Seele
rebelled against it then and until the end of his life.

Shortly after his arrival in Berlin,
Horowitz met Rudolf Serkin, and a lifelong friendship began. Serkin was
friendly with the cellist Francesco Mendelssohn (a descendant of the composer),
and one evening invited him to a party in his house. Mendelssohn came with
Horowitz in tow.

Serkin had not heard of Horowitz, and he
politely greeted the unexpected guest. There were food and drink, conversation,
music. Serkin played. Mendelssohn told Serkin that Horowitz was a very good
pianist, and Serkin asked him to play something. Horowitz, who never needed
much urging, complied. What Serkin heard galvanized him. It gave him a
completely new idea of piano technique and the possibilities of the instrument,
and the experience remained vivid with him for the rest of his life. He spoke
about it not long before he died in 1991:

Horowitz played a Liszt
transcription and some Chopin. I was completely overwhelmed at this kind of
technique, power, intensity, and musicianship. The colors! I never heard
anything like it. We liked each other and had a lot to talk about. Later he
stayed with me in Basel for three weeks. We played four-hand music together, we
played for each other, we discussed everything about the piano. We became very
close friends and remained so. I learned so much from him. Never had I seen
such concentration at the keyboard. Only a pianist can appreciate what he did.
I had never even imagined this kind of playing before, and it opened a new
world for me.

Horowitz looked up Artur Schnabel, an
atypical product of the Leschetizky school in that he turned almost exclusively
to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert in his later years. But the supposedly
austere Schnabel continued to play Chopin and Liszt until about 1930. The fact
that he became the leading pianist of the Austro-German classics did not
inhibit his romanticism in that kind of music; and, remembering his concert
appearances and listening to his recordings, one hears a kind of Romantic
rhetoric that has vanished from the playing of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert
today.

Schnabel had heard Horowitz play in
Leningrad and had told Genya that he would take him into his class if he ever
came to Berlin. Horowitz, for his part, had heard Schnabel in Leningrad and was
impressed, especially with his performance of the Chopin B flat minor Sonata (a
work that Schnabel dropped from his repertoire in the 1930s). “In the last
movement, every note was there!” enthused Horowitz. (The last movement is a
short – about one and a half minutes – sotto voce, prestissimo movement in
single notes an octave apart, and it is very difficult to carry off.) He also
heard Schnabel play Liszt, and his comment many years later was, “Not bad.”
From Horowitz that was extraordinary praise.

So Horowitz got in touch with
Schnabel, went to his studio, and played the Schumann Fantasy. He claimed to
have played only ten bars or so when Schnabel interrupted him, swept him away
from the piano, sat down and started to play the piece himself to demonstrate
how Schumann really intended it to go. He ended up, said Horowitz, playing the
complete work. Horowitz hated every bar of it. A few days later Schnabel sent a
bill for £5 – $25 – to Merovitch for the “lesson.” Horowitz was at first
stupefied, then outraged, and finally he thought it was funny. He did not know
if Schnabel was ever paid. “If he was, Merovitch never told me.”

[…]

Of all the German pianists Horowitz
heard, the two he most admired were Walter Gieseking and Wilhelm Backhaus:

I was impressed mostly by
Gieseking [Horowitz said in 1987]. He had a finished style, played with
elegance, and had a fine musical mind. Emil Sauer was also a good pianist, good
technique, style. Very good fingers. He was a Liszt pupil. He was at his best
in salon music – Chopin waltzes, things like that. But I heard him play a very
good, very correct Op. 109. Some of the Liszt pupils were horrible. One I could
never understand was Siloti. He played very badly. Another Liszt pupil was the
famous Moriz Rosenthal, and I hated his playing. He couldn’t make one nice
phrase. I don’t understand how he got his fame. Perhaps when I heard him he was
too old to have any control. He had dexterity but he had no real technique, and
I don’t think he really knew how to play the piano. He didn’t make music.

Backhaus was a wonderful
pianist, not really representative of the German style. About him I can speak
with real enthusiasm. He was more relaxed than most of them. I once heard him
play the Chopin etudes and it was remarkable. In the first one in C major not a
single note fell under the piano. It was fantastic. He heard me play Liszt’s Feux follets and came up to me. “Horowitz,”
he said, “I could never do that.” But he was being nice. He could have if he
wanted. I have often been asked what I consider the most difficult piece I have
ever played. I can answer that quickly. It was Feux follets. The Liszt Don
Juan is not an easy piece, either.

I heard Edwin Fischer, who
did not mean much to me. I heard another pianist in Berlin who had a big
success and I thought he was awful – Mischa Levitzki. Just fingers, and you
cannot listen only to fingers. There is a difference between artist and
artisan. Levitzki was an artisan. But Ignaz Friedman, who I admired, was a
great artist. He had wonderful fingers and a very personal, individual way of
playing, even if some of his ideas were very strange to me. He had no
hesitation touching up the music. I got annoyed with him at one concert when he
changed the basses in Chopin’s F minor Ballade. I didn’t like that. For some
reason he was happier making records than he was on the stage.

Horowitz went to the three Berlin opera
houses as often as he could. His favorite work was Richard Strauss’s Salome. In Russia he had become familiar
with the music and had memorized large sections of it. To the end of his life
he played excerpts from the opera at home for his friends, tearing into the
“Dance of the Seven Veils” with abandon. In Berlin he heard the composer
conduct Salome. One thing about the
performance Horowitz never forgot. Strauss was constantly looking at his watch.

For the oncoming three recitals
scheduled for January, Horowitz and Merovitch put together programs they hoped
would demonstrate all aspects of his talent – his sonority, his virtuosity, his
musicianship. The first program was built around the Schumann Fantasy. It
opened with the Bach-Busoni Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C. Then, after the
Schumann, there would be Rachmaninoff and the tremendous Mozart-Liszt Don Juan paraphrase. The second program
contained Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata, Ravel (the Sonatine and other pieces), and
the Mozart-Liszt Figaro. For the
third program there was the Liszt B minor Sonata, a work not played very often
in those days, especially in Germany. The thunderous Liszt, of course, is one
of the monumental piano works of the nineteenth century. Merovitch had also
signed a contract with the Berlin Symphony (not to be confused with the Berlin
Philharmonic) for a performance of the Tchaikovsky B flat minor Concerto with
Horowitz.

Horowitz tried out the pianos of
various manufacturers and settled on a Steinway, which he played for the rest
of his life. No other instrument, he felt, could approach its powerful,
brilliant bass, the responsiveness of the action and its potential for color.
Merovitch scouted around for a manager and finally settled on the Wolff-Sachs
agency in Berlin. Wolff-Sachs would handle all of the details of the Horowitz
appearances – advertising, choice of hall, responsibility for pulling in
audiences, and the press releases to newspapers and critics.

Wolff-Sachs was not particularly
lavish in its publicity efforts. The only advertisement one can find appeared
January 1, 1926. On that day the readers of the Musik-Zeitung, Berlin’s most important musical weekly, could learn
from a small advertisement that one Vladimir Horowitz would be giving three Klavierabende in the Beethovensaal on January
2, 4, 14. Wolff-Sachs had also arranged for an appearance with the Berlin Symphony
after the second concert.

A debut recital in a major city is a
harrowing, even searing, experience for any musician, especially an unknown
one. Weeks before the advertisement appeared, Horowitz and Merovitch started
worrying. Terrible, nightmarish things must have gone through their minds. Item: Wolff-Sachs was a highly respected
agency, but would it be able to attract any kind of audience for a young,
unknown Russian pianist? How awful it would be if nobody came. Item: Would a critic attend the concert?
If there was no press coverage, the recital might be a waste of time and money.
Item: If a critic did attend, would
he understand what the performer was trying to do? Item: Would any major musician attend the recital? For word of
mouth in the professional musical community is of supreme importance in
furthering a career. Item: Would
there be the kind of miracle wherein a wealthy music lover would be so
impressed with the young Russian genius that he would act as his sponsor?

All one could do was practice, wait,
worry, and hope.

5. Crashing
Through

My career was finished
forever. I didn’t sleep the whole night. I was in despair. I called a doctor to
give me an injection to calm me down. I told him I have to go back to Russia.

– Vladimir Horowitz, after his second
Berlin concert

It was a nervous man of twenty-three
who walked on to the stage of Beethovensaal on January 2, 1926, bowed to the
audience, and started playing. The high-strung Vladimir Horowitz was on edge
after a sleepless night. He admitted as much many years later. He also said
that perhaps he was not at his best, because so much was hanging on this
concert that nerves got the better of him.

He also remembered that there were no
more than fifty people in the audience (the hall seated around a thousand) and
no critics at all.

His memory was inaccurate on both
counts. The audience was reported in the press as half full, and there were
indeed critics there, including Heinz Pfingsheim of Musik-Zeitung.

Two days after the debut Horowitz
played the second recital, and he thought the concert had gone flat. He was
hysterical when he got back to his hotel room. He had failed, he told
Merovitch. He was a miserable pianist. He had to go back to Russia.

[…]

The first reviews of Horowitz’s Berlin
debut recital on January 2 did not start appearing until almost two weeks after
the concert.

[…]

So the $5,000 that Horowitz had
smuggled out of Russia was well spent. The gamble had paid off. Reading the
reviews, one paramount thing becomes immediately apparent: everybody realized
that Horowitz had something more than fingers. He could communicate. That slim,
intense figure on stage simply forced the audience into awed respect. Horowitz
had extraordinary personality, a stage presence all but palpable. All of the
artists who have gone on to superstar status had this charisma, and it is something
that cannot be taught. Toscanini had it. Callas had it. Horowitz had it.
Whatever it is, it resides in the performer’s psyche, and without it there can
be no super career.

The third recital was sold out and
Horowitz finally was satisfied with himself. He thought he played as well as he
could. The public was enthusiastic, especially about the Liszt Sonata. German
critics and audiences of the day had a tendency to regard the Liszt B minor
Sonata with distaste; to them it was a large dead animal that was somewhat
overripe. But they had not heard Vladimir Horowitz play it. After his
performances the Liszt B minor Sonata began to be recognized for what it is – a
great, imaginative, monumental piece of music, something far more than a
technical stunt.

Offers came in – for concert appearances
and also, from Welte-Mignon, for piano-roll recordings. Horowitz and Merovitch
looked at each other. Things were going along very nicely.

Merovitch booked two concert
appearances in Hamburg, and he and Horowitz arrived there a few days before the
concerts. An advertisement in the Hamburg Echo
notified the public on January 17, 1926, that Vladimir Horowitz would be giving
a recital on Tuesday, January 19, at the Hotel Atlantic.

But no critic from the Echo was there to review it. Instead
there was a review in the Fremdenblatt,
which appeared, atypically, on January 20, the day after the concert. It was
signed M. Br.-Sch., which stood for Max Broesecke-Schön. He must have been one
of the faster writers in the German critical press.

[…]

This was, on the whole, a review that
would have made Horowitz and Merovitch very happy. In the afternoon they left
the Atlantic Hotel, where they were staying, and went for a walk. The rest is
history. As Horowitz told the story:

We went out walking, in the
zoo. When we came back to the hotel about six-thirty there was waiting for us
the manager of the symphony orchestra. He was very nervous. A woman [Helene
Zimmermann] who was supposed to play the Tchaikovsky with the orchestra that
very evening had fainted during the rehearsal and was in no condition to play. He
asked me to replace her.

It was six-thirty when I
received the news. “Can you play in two hours?” On two hours’ notice? No
rehearsals? I thought a little bit and said yes. I rushed to shave and get into
evening clothes. Of course there was no time for rehearsal. Before the concert
Eugen Pabst, the conductor, had a little talk with me about tempos. He was not
very simpatico. He looked at me as if to say, “Who is this guy coming here to
play with me?” He said, “I conduct like this, and this, and this. You have to
follow me.” I said, “OK, sir. OK, sir. Yes, I will.” I didn’t even know what
kind of piano I was playing. Of course in Hamburg it had to be the Hamburg Steinway,
but was it even in tune? How was the action? I knew nothing. It turned out to
be a very good piano.

When I came out nobody even
applauded. They had never heard of me. Just like if you go to a concert to hear
Mr. Smith. Who is Mr. Smith? So Pabst started the concerto, pom, pom, pom, pom,
POM. When I played the first three chords he turned from the orchestra, he
looked at me like he didn’t believe what he was hearing, and he didn’t conduct
for a while. He came next to the keyboard to listen. He still didn’t believe
it. He never heard sound like that. When I finished the cadenza and he was back
on the podium, he began to follow me. There was no longer any question of me
following him. When the concerto was finished, it was bedlam, absolutely
bedlam. The audience went wild. I never saw anything like that in my life. In
1986 I returned to Hamburg for the first time since then, and I got a letter
from Pabst’s daughter. She apologized for being unable to attend the [1986]
concert, and then in the letter she told me the whole story about the
Tchaikovsky again.

[…]

After the Hamburg concerts, word was
flashed all through Germany and Horowitz was famous. Merovitch was now able to
book him for about forty European concerts through 1927 at an increased fee.

Germany was conquered. Now it was time
for Paris. Merovitch had booked a hall there for an early February concert and,
full of elation and anticipation, Horowitz and his manager took the train to
the French capital. They traveled third class; they were just about broke.

6. Parisian
Lion

I remember once when I was
new in Paris a lady I knew who managed concerts asked me to sit for a portrait.
She said the artist was very good and one day would be famous. I asked what I
would have to do for that. She said sit for two or three hours twice a week. Never,
I said. Never. Good-bye. The painter’s
name was Bonnard.

– Vladimir Horowitz, about a missed
opportunity during his early days in Paris

“He made Paris tremble,” Arthur
Rubinstein once ruefully said, talking about that first Horowitz season early
in 1926.

It did not take Horowitz and Merovitch
very long to discover that Horowitz’s reputation had preceded him in the French
capital. Horowitz may have been unknown to the French public, but not to the
professionals. Word of mouth in musical circles had traveled with its usual
speed. The critics were primed and waiting. This time, Horowitz said, he did
not feel edgy. After his German success he was confident that he could handle
himself anywhere.

And he could. He simply overwhelmed
Paris, and seldom in the musical life of that city did an artist make so
explosive an impact. The startled critics and the public were carried away with
what they instantly recognized as a new style of playing.

[…]

The first Horowitz appearance in Paris
took place on February 12, 1926, and the locale was the hall of the old Paris
Conservatoire, where Chopin had played the premiere of his Andante Spianato and
Polonaise in 1835. The Horowitz concert was hastily arranged, without much in
the way of publicity. That accounted for the small audience. Many of those
present were Russian émigrés, gathered together by Merovitch. The program
consisted of the Bach-Busoni Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C; the Liszt Sonata;
several of Ravel’s Miroirs (including
Alborada del gracioso) and Jeux d’eau; and a Chopin group
consisting of the Barcarolle, some etudes and mazurkas and the A flat
Polonaise.

But if the audience was small, the
important critics were there, and they realized that they were in the presence
of something new.

[…]

The climax of Horowitz’s first year in
Paris came with a recital at the Opéra on December 14. This time he repeated
some of the pieces he had been playing in his previous series: the Bach-Busoni
Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C; the Liszt Sonata; six Chopin etudes, three mazurkas,
and the A flat Polonaise; the two Paganini-Liszt etudes [Nos. 2 & 6 – Ed.]
and the SpanishRhapsody. His encores were Mendelssohn’s Spinning Song [Op. 67 No. 4 – Ed.], the Schubert-Liszt Liebesbotschaft, and his own Carmen Variations. The Carmen threw the
audience into a frenzy, and the police had to be called in to evacuate the
hall.

In the ten following years, until his
first retirement, Horowitz gave some thirty concerts in Paris. The city could
never get enough of him; he created a sensation every time he played. And, of
course, every pianist rushed to hear the fabulous new virtuoso.

[…]

Naturally this brilliant newcomer was
automatically admitted to the most exclusive salons of Paris. Chief among them
was the home of the Princesse de Polignac, where one would invariably bump into
Stravinsky, or members of Les Six, or Nadia Boulanger. It was in the salons
that much new music was first heard; composers tried out their pieces there. Horowitz
was always welcome chez Polignac, and also at the salons of Vicomtesse de
Noailles, or Elsa Maxwell or Misia Sert. About two years later he met the
American composer Alexander Steinert at the salon of Prince Rofredo Bassiano,
and Steinert became one of his closest friends.

Arthur Rubinstein in his memoirs has
given a vivid idea of life and fun in the Parisian salons of his day. He was on
close terms with all the right people – Countess Greffulhe, Count Jean de
Castellano, Princesse Yourievskaya, Count Potocki, Prince and Princesse de
Polignac and Count and Comtesse de Ganay. In one charming passage of his
memoirs Rubinstein reports spending a weekend with the Polignacs at Reims. Back
in Paris he runs into Jean Cocteau. “Are you going to Misia’s?” Cocteau asks. Rubinstein
says he has not been invited. “Come with me. She has Diaghilev, Massine, and
Eric Satie to hear a ballet by Milhaud which he will play four-hands with
Auric.” The ballet was Milhaud’s wonderful Le
boeuf sur le toit. Such was the artistic life in Paris in the 1920s. What a
time for the young and talented in music – or, of course, any of the arts – to
be there! Picasso and Braque and Vlaminck; Joyce and Hemingway; Cocteau,
Honegger, and Massine; Ravel and Poulenc; René Clair, Virgil Thomson, and
Diaghilev; Dali, Chagall; the stern goddess known as Nadia Boulanger; Gertrude
Stein….

Many Russian refugees were in Paris at
the time – intellectuals, musicians, nobility, military men, all waiting for
the nonsense in Russia to be over so they could come back. They thought the
Revolution was only temporary. Chaliapin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Balanchine
were living in Paris. Such Russian critics as Leonid Sabaneyev, Boris de
Schloezer, Peter Souvtchinsky, and Arthur Lourié became fixtures of the musical
life there. Horowitz and Merovitch were friendly with all of them. […] The
tight little colony of Russian intellectuals in Paris were constantly in touch
with each other and exerted a good deal of influence in the artistic life of
the city.

Young, handsome, shy, brilliantly
talented, elegant in dress and demeanor, fluent in French, Horowitz became an
increasingly popular figure in the salons. There he met all the important
musicians, littérateurs, and society
figures of Paris. Among the composers he socialized with were Roussel, Poulenc,
Szymanowski, Honegger, and Respighi.

“One night,” he recollected, “I played
Ravel’s Jeux d’eau at a salon and
this little man came to me and said that he was Ravel and that I had a great
talent. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you should know in our country we play Jeux d’eau differently. We play it more
impressionistically, like Debussy, but you played it in the style of Liszt.’ I
said I was sorry. What could I say? In the meantime Ravel was thinking. He
looked at me and said, ‘I think you are right. It is very Lisztian.’” Newspapers
later helped Horowitz out by improving on the story. Most versions have
Horowitz not knowing who the little man was until Ravel, after the musical talk
about the piece was over, introduced himself and left Horowitz with his mouth
wide open.

[…]

None of Horowitz’s music has been
published. He composed a number of piano pieces, a violin sonata, a cello work,
and some songs. The only work of his own that he ever recorded on flat disc is
his Danse exotique. It is charming
and sophisticated, in the French salon style, influenced by Poulenc and
ragtime. Horowitz claimed that he had written it before leaving Russia. He made
a Welte piano roll of the piece in 1926 and also a Victor recording in 1930. On
the roll its title is Moment exotique.
For Victor it has two names. First it came out on a ten-inch disc as Danse exotique by Horowitz-Demeny. Nobody
seems to know who Demeny was. This was followed by the same performance, also
on a ten-inch disc, under a different title: Danseexcentrique, and
the composer is listed merely as Horowitz. The reference to Demeny has
vanished. Both discs have the same label number – 1468.

The ebullient Poulenc and Horowitz
were introduced at one of the salons and became good friends:

He was wonderful. He would
barge into my flat without an appointment, always in a hurry, full of
enthusiasm. “Horowitz, I have for you a nocturne! I have come to play it for
you!” He would sit down and play it. “Good-bye!” And he would rush away. He
knew the piano well and was a very good pianist. For years I played his Toccata
in my recitals. I remember once we all had dinner at Charles de Polignac’s
salon. Poulenc played a new piece for me and I told him the ending was
terrible. So he changed it. I sometimes played my own compositions for him, and
he enjoyed them very much. The three composers who had the nicest things to say
about my pieces were Poulenc, Prokofiev, and Szymanowski.

In Paris the most important French
pianist was Alfred Cortot, one of the supreme twentieth-century keyboard
artists. Horowitz blew hot and cold about Cortot. It always seemed hard for him
to give another pianist unqualified praise. But even so, Horowitz admired
Cortot the interpreter even if he did not admire Cortot the technician:

His Chopin and Schumann
were for me the best. His Schumann was fantastic. He had good taste and a good
but not great technique, though he lost his technique in the last years of his
life. He played a lot on the radio. I remember hearing him in many things. Once
I visited Rachmaninoff in Switzerland at his house. When I walked in he was
laughing so loud his false teeth were coming out. I asked him what was so
funny.

“I have just been listening
on the radio to Cortot playing all the Chopin etudes.”

“That was so good?” I
asked.

“Wonderful. But, you know,
the most difficult of the etudes were the ones he played most ‘musical.’”

The word “musical” applied by virtuoso
pianists to other pianists is often a code word meaning good musician, not so
good fingers or, in baseball lingo, good field, no hit. Rachmaninoff was so
amused because Cortot covered up his technical deficiencies by playing slowly
in the hard passages. Critics and connoisseurs, taken in, automatically hailed the
slow passages as “musical.” So the more Cortot slowed up, the more everybody
would say “How musical!” (When Horowitz told the story a sour look came over
his face. “Today,” he said, “that has become the thing. Everybody plays slow,
pianists, singers, everybody, and that shows how musical they are. It is crazy,
I tell you.”)

[…]

When Horowitz arrived in Paris he had
a letter of introduction from Neuhaus to Arthur Rubinstein, who was about
twenty years older than Horowitz and a popular pianist in Paris, especially in
the salons. They saw a good deal of each other, but Horowitz had the feeling
that Rubinstein didn’t like him very much. “Something didn’t click between us.
Maybe he was jealous.” Nevertheless they often met in Rubinstein’s house in
Montmartre. “He once played the orchestral part of the Brahms B flat Concerto
for me on the second piano. He hadn’t studied it at that time and wanted to be
more familiar with it. At least we had one thing in common – neither of us ever
worked on technique. We studied only repertoire. Rubinstein never practiced.
Like with me, everything with him was spontaneous.”

The basic difference between
Rubinstein and Horowitz was that where Rubinstein generated love, Horowitz
generated awe. In My Many Years, the
second volume of his autobiography, Rubinstein has a few words to say about his
relationship with Horowitz. Even before they met he admits to some jealousy because
everybody in Paris was talking about the young Horowitz. Shortly after their
first meeting, Rubinstein went to a Horowitz concert and was impressed: “I
shall never forget the two Paganini-Liszt etudes, the E flat and E major ones.
There was much more than sheer brilliance and technique; there was an easy
elegance – the magic which defies description.”

After the concert Rubinstein went
backstage with many others. Horowitz, “sweating and pale, received the great
homage with regal indifference.” When Rubinstein went up to him Horowitz said
that he had played a wrong note in Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie. “I would
gladly give ten years of my life,” Rubinstein ruefully noted, “to be able to
claim only one wrong note after a concert.”

The two often played together, four
hands or at two pianos. On the surface they were friends, but Rubinstein says that
he began to feel “a subtle difference” between them:

His friendship was that of
a king to his subject, which means he befriended
me and, in a way, used me. In short, he did not consider me an equal. It caused
me to begin to feel a deep artistic depression. Deep within myself I felt I was
the better musician. My conception of the sense of music was more mature, but
at the same time I was conscious of my terrible defects – of my negligence of
detail, my treatment of some concerts as a pleasant pastime, all due to that
devilish facility for grasping and learning pieces and then playing them
lightheartedly in public; with all the conviction of my own musical
superiority, I had to concede that Volodya was by far the better pianist.

Incidentally, Rubinstein thought of
Jascha Heifetz much as he thought of Horowitz. “I never envied either of them
their great success and I took it for granted that Heifetz was the greatest
violinist of his time, who never touched my heart with his playing, and Horowitz,
the greatest pianist but not a great musician. On this premise our trio got
along together quite well.”

A pianist Horowitz met in Paris and
admired very much was Ignaz Friedman, a Pole born in 1882 who had been a
Leschetizky pupil. In recent years piano buffs and young pianists have
rediscovered the Friedman recordings, all made before World War II, and have
been studying them openmouthed. Friedman was a technician almost in Horowitz’s
class, with an even bigger, more colorful sound. He played with great
generosity of spirit and an abandon that was always emotionally controlled. Nobody
has played the Chopin mazurkas with such a rakish quality, such affinity for
the rhythms of the Polish dance, such fluency and imagination. He was a very
close friend of Rachmaninoff’s, and that alone would have endeared him to the
young Horowitz, who idolized Rachmaninoff but had not yet met him.

Friedman was one of the few pianists
about whom Horowitz, later in life, would talk about with real respect. “Nobody
has made a better recording of the E flat Nocturne [Op. 55, No. 2] than
Friedman did. It is amazing.” But in concert Friedman occasionally bothered
Horowitz with “too many eccentric ideas. He played the F minor Ballade rolling all
the left-hand chords at the big opening theme. Personally Friedman was a nice
man, a darling, an angel. He loved to hear me, came to all my concerts, and he understood
my playing.”

Horowitz had mixed feelings about
another giant, Leopold Godowsky:

Godowsky had tremendous
equipment, but in public he pulled back and was not very exciting. In the
studio Godowsky was something else. I used to stand near the piano and watch
his fingers. He had indescribable leggiero. Such scales! He had been a friend
of Saint-Saëns’s, and he got that technique from him. He got incredible effects
but I did not like his playing. It was not for me. What a pianist can learn is
very easy. What you cannot learn is very difficult. Anybody can learn to play
fast. When you practice Chopin ten hours a day for years, as Godowsky did, of
course it will go like that. That’s no real achievement. Godowsky was a very
good musician, but he overloaded the music he played. It was too much, all the
extra stuff he put into it. In his Chopin he played all the notes but
everything else was missing. He played everything mezzo-forte, without
dynamics. It all sounded the same.

Horowitz kept a small apartment on the
Rue Kléber in Paris. It was all he could afford. Until he went to America in
1928, he was playing a great deal all over Europe but not making much money. Or
so he said. It is true that in 1926 and 1927 he was unable to command the fees
that his American success in 1928 guaranteed. But even before the days of real
affluence, Horowitz had money. His problem was that he spent it almost as fast
as he made it. Always the dandy, he bought clothing “and nice things.” And the
more he made, the more he spent. When he went to England after his American
tour, he had enough left over to buy a Rolls. He had $6,000 in the bank and the
Rolls cost him $5,000, an enormous sum in those depression days. Horowitz never
learned to drive his Rolls and had to engage a chauffeur. Driving a car was too
hard for him, he said. Playing the octaves in the Tchaikovsky was much easier.

7. On the
Road

We always had to borrow
money. When we traveled, it was third class because we could not afford the
best accommodations. I ate cheese sandwiches, believe me, not truffles and
caviar.

–
Vladimir Horowitz, on his early touring days with Merovitch

Now that the Horowitz career was under
way, he started the traveling routine that is part of the recitalist’s life. He
went where his manager sent him. Young artists do not pick and choose; a career
is yet to be solidified. So Horowitz learned to put up with the drudgery of the
routine: into a city after a long train trip, into a third-class hotel, a
concert that evening, bad pianos everywhere, dull after-concert receptions,
inferior food, and then, as often as not, back on a train the next day. Horowitz
discovered, as all the others have done, that there is nothing very glamorous about
a touring artist’s life. As early as the 1850s the American idol Louis Moreau Gottschalk
had expressed it as well as anybody: “Arrived at half-past eight at the hotel,
took in a hurry a cup of bad tea, and away to business. One herring for dinner!
nine hours on train! and, in spite of everything, five hundred persons who have
paid that you may give them two hours of poesy, of passion, and of inspiration.
I confess to you secretly that they certainly will be cheated this evening.”

Horowitz found himself playing in most
of the European countries, going from Portugal to England to Norway to Sweden
to Germany and Italy, and it is hard to find a negative critical response to
the young Horowitz. A reviewer might have had reservations about this or that, but
every one responded to the high-voltage playing and the powerful musical
personality.

[…]

Horowitz played a great deal in
Germany, but he made Paris his headquarters. At one of his recitals there, in
1927, a very sharp, experienced pair of ears listened to the playing with more
than usual interest, and then read the reviews with a calculating eye. The
result was an offer to go to America under the very highest auspices. Horowitz
and Merovitch would, of course, have eventually made their way to New York, but
the deus ex machina who was at the 1927 concert made the process much easier.

He was the American concert manager Arthur Judson. Judson approached Merovitch, offering to represent Horowitz in
America and suggesting thirty concerts in the United States for the 1927–28 music
season. Merovitch may have known something about the Judson organization, but
neither he nor Horowitz could have realized the power that Judson exerted in
the musical life of America. They were, after all, still greenhorns from
Russia. But to a musician who knew anything about the commercial and managerial side
of American classical music, an unsolicited approach from Arthur Judson would
be something like a parish priest being summoned by His Holiness the Pope.

At the time Judson was already the
strongest manager in America, and that was nothing compared to what he became a
few years after he took Horowitz under his wing. His very presence carried an
aura of power. A big, handsome, dignified, imposing, even imperious man, a
trained musician (violinist and conductor), he took over a good part of the
American musical establishment.

Between 1930 and 1935 he was,
simultaneously, the manager of the New York Philharmonic and its summer
concerts at Lewisohn Stadium; the manager of the Philadelphia orchestra and its
Robin Hood Dell summer concerts since 1915; the president of Columbia Concerts
(the largest music managerial office in the world) and Community Concerts
(which he had set up to book musicians into cities all over the United States);
the second largest stockholder of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and the
sole owner of Columbia Records. Most of the world’s leading conductors were
under contract to him, and many of the greatest instrumentalists and singers. Thus
when a Columbia Concerts artist appeared with an orchestra or was booked around
the country, Judson shared the artists’ fee.

[…]

Judson’s influence up to World War II
extended into the press, which was not then as concerned about conflict of
interest as it is today. Two great New York newspapers had critics who were in
effect on Judson’s payroll. Olin Downes from the Times was intermission
commentator for the New York Philharmonic broadcasts, and that stately figure
of Yankee probity, Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune, wrote the program
notes. Nobody raised an eyebrow; it was common practice. Today, on the New York
Times, such extracurricular activity would be unthinkable.

Judson and Merovitch worked out the
schedule for the first Horowitz appearances in America. His debut was scheduled
for January 12, 1928, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Sir Thomas
Beecham in Carnegie Hall. It also was to be Beecham’s American debut. Then
there would be a concert tour of the United States, first in concerto
appearances, then in solo recitals.

Horowitz was thrilled with the
prospect and, as he said, frightened a little. Could he conquer America as he
had Europe? And there was something on his mind that compulsively overrode
everything else, including even his American debut, important as that was.

Now was his chance to meet Sergei
Rachmaninoff, who was living in New York.

[…]

So on his second day in New York
Horowitz got Alexander (known to all as Sascha) Greiner, the concert and
artists manager of Steinway & Sons, to telephone Rachmaninoff and make an
appointment.

[…]

On the designated afternoon, Horowitz
went to visit his hero. Rachmaninoff, then fifty-five years old and thus more
than twice the age of Horowitz, had an apartment on West End Avenue. Horowitz
was trembling when he rang the doorbell:

I was scared to death. Would
my idol like me? He was a little bit anti-Semitic, you know. He was terribly
anti-Communist, and he thought it was the Jews who had made the Communist revolution.
He opened the door and was very polite. We started to talk about music and especially
about his Third Concerto, which I had to play. He asked me what cadenza I
played, and this and that. He said, “When you are free I would like to hear you
and I will accompany you.” Then he went to the piano and played pieces by
Medtner. He never had a good instrument in his house. It was a small apartment.
The piano, a Steinway Model L, was in his bedroom. We both liked Medtner’s
music very much, though I had not played it in public for a long time. Rachmaninoff
and I immediately had a rapport, right away. Like electricity. I don’t know how
it happened.

Horowitz also played some Medtner.
Rachmaninoff listened, not saying much. The two men were sizing each other up. They
chatted pleasantly; they discussed the forthcoming Horowitz performances of the
D minor Piano Concerto; they talked about Blumenfeld, Prokofiev, and other
musicians they knew and the musical scene in Russia. Horowitz felt that they
were going to be friends despite the thirty-year difference in their age.

The next day Rachmaninoff reported
back to Greiner by telephone and discussed Horowitz’s playing. “I don’t know
how Horowitz does it,” Rachmaninoff said. “He plays against all the rules and
regulations of piano playing as we were taught – but with him it works.”

About Rachmaninoff’s anti-Semitism: perhaps
Horowitz was reading things into a few offhand remarks that Rachmaninoff made. In
the Rachmaninoff biography by Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, an episode is
cited that suggests Rachmaninoff’s strong aversion to racism. In 1912 he was a
vice president of the Russian Musical Society, and when “he learned that a very
good musician in an administrative post in one of the Society’s schools was to
be dismissed on the ground that he was Jewish, Rachmaninoff promptly submitted
his resignation.”

Now Horowitz, thrilled that he and
Rachmaninoff had hit it off, was in an elated frame of mind for Tchaikovsky,
Beecham, and the Philharmonic.

He could not have known what was about
to happen.

8. ''The
Octave Race''

I was less controlled in
those days and there was sometimes a show-off quality to my playing. Beecham
tried to keep up but couldn’t, and he and I did not end together, but the
important thing was that I played my way, not his.

Vladimir
Horowitz, on his American debut with Beecham

New York had never seen a debut
appearance like the collaboration between Vladimir Horowitz and Thomas Beecham.
Horowitz was to describe it as “crazy”.

Beecham undoubtedly had heard of
Horowitz, but had not heard him play and certainly did not know how he was
going to approach the concerto. Anyway, Horowitz believed that Beecham was much
more interested in making a good impression in his New York debut than in
paying much attention to “me, a little Jewish boy from Kiev.”

At the rehearsals of the Tchaikovsky,
Beecham conducted without music but, Horowitz claimed, he did not know the
concerto that well. His tempos were
the slowest that Horowitz ever encountered, and the disgusted pianist
considered them positively plodding. Beecham went his own way, apparently not
even bothering to listen to the soloist. So the ensemble was terrible.
Conductor and soloist were not together at the rehearsals, and Horowitz had the
feeling that they would not be together at the performance. He said he did not
sleep at all the night before the big moment, and he arrived at Carnegie Hall on
the evening of January 12 in an apprehensive state. Rachmaninoff was in the
audience, and that alone would have been enough to unnerve Horowitz. Many other
musicians were there; word of mouth about a brilliant newcomer was operating as
usual. In Horowitz’s own words:

We walked on stage. His
opening tempo was very slow. I still believe he did this on purpose, to play me
down. I am told that he broke his suspenders during the first piece and had to
conduct with one hand, holding up his pants with the other. [True.] So he was
not in a good mood when he came out for the concerto. When the performance
started, for a little bit I followed him. Then I felt I could hear people
snoring in the audience, it was so slow. I could see that my American career
already was over. So I said to myself, “He can go to hell.” So I played my own
tempos. I wanted to show my octaves, everything. I had to do this because I
wanted to have the greatest success of my life. I kept thinking that if I did
not have a success I would have to go back to Russia. In the last movement
Beecham started slow and when I came in I took my own tempo. I ran away. I
played the octaves the loudest, the fastest, they ever heard in their life. I
was too fast, I admit it. It was not artistic. It was show-off, pour épater le bourgeois.

After the concerto I was
greeted by people in the artists’ room. One of my visitors was Olin Downes, the
critic of the New York Times. He was
all excited. Then I left for home, saying nothing to Beecham. But we were not
enemies or anything like that. He did not dislike me, the way Furtwängler
disliked me. A few years later I had to play the Tchaikovsky in London with
Beecham. When I walked into the hall for the first rehearsal, Beecham said,
“Mr. Horowitz, I have the score.” And it was a wonderful performance. This time
he was a darling.

The octaves Horowitz refers to is the
passage near the end of the finale, and it is the climax of the concerto.
Horowitz, excited, nervous, took off like a sprinter from the blocks, and he
created a whirlwind that simply blew the audience out of its seats. At the end
there was an animal roar from the thrilled listeners. Whatever the musical
merits or demerits of the Horowitz explosion, New York had never heard anything
like it.

There must have been at least
twenty-five daily newspapers in New York in those days, including
foreign-language papers, and most of them had music critics. Horowitz got some
bad reviews – the critic of the Evening World, for instance, called the
Tchaikovsky “an exhibition of piano playing in its most degraded state” – but
the important critics jumped on the Horowitz bandwagon.

Then, as now, the most powerful
arbiter of musical taste was the New York Times,
and from 1924 to his death in 1955 Olin Downes was its music critic. A stout,
extroverted Viking of a man, Downes wrote in flamboyant prose influenced by
James Huneker. Himself a bit of a pianist, Downes was basically a fan who
empathized with all pianists, mentally playing along and dissolving with
excitement when something especially wonderful happened.

Downes called Horowitz “a young
virtuoso of brilliant technic and overwhelming temperament… sensational if by
no means impeccable.” He said that it had been years since a pianist created
such a formidable impression in New York City. Downes noted that Beecham had
not used a score and mildly said that “if he had had a score before him there
might have been smoother cooperation with the pianist… It was quickly evident
either that conductor and pianist had not sufficiently rehearsed… of that there
were differences of conception.” It was clear to Downes that Horowitz wanted a
faster tempo at the beginning of the concerto, “and there were many pages where
the two see-sawed their ideas.” Nevertheless Horowitz “made a tremendous
impression… His treatment of the work was a whirlwind of virtuoso
interpretation. Mr. Horowitz has amazing technic, amazing strength,
irresistible youth and temperament.” And in the slow movement the pianist
showed that he could evoke beautiful colors. Thus despite the lack of
coordination with the orchestra and a sometimes overstressed tone in forte
passages, the performance triumphed because of the pianist’s “electrical
temperament, physical capacity for tremendous climax of sonority and lightning
speed.” The occasion marked “the appearance of a new pianistic talent which
cannot be ignored or minimized.” In his last paragraph, Downes hedged, as
experienced critics are wont to do: “As has been before said in these columns,
one concert does not make a conductor or a virtuoso either. Half a dozen barely
suffice to test a new leader. But within the limits of a single concert, there
was no question of this triumph.”

[…]

A day or two after the performance
Horowitz received a letter from Rachmaninoff. It said: “Mr. Horowitz, you have
won the octaves race. Nobody has ever played them like you. But I will not
congratulate you because it was not musical.” Rachmaninoff was disturbed by the
undisciplined impulsiveness that Horowitz showed. If ever a pianist represented
ultimate technical and emotional control it was Rachmaninoff, and he would not
have responded happily to the show-off octaves and extroverted bravura that
marked this performance. Horowitz said that he was “disturbed, a little” by the
letter, but he felt that it would not harm their relationship. In any event,
Rachmaninoff had, of course, known perfectly well what had happened and, seated
in the audience, must have sweated out the desperate pianist’s problems with
his conductor.

As for Merovitch, he was happy. Horowitz’s
name was in all the papers, and that was all that mattered.

Then Horowitz started his American
tour, playing a series of orchestral dates in the big cities. He made his
American recital debut in Carnegie Hall on February 20, 1928, playing the
Bach-Busoni Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C; some Scarlatti; and Chopin’s
etudes and mazurkas and the A flat Polonaise. His pièce de résistance was the Liszt Sonata.

Again every pianist who was in New
York, or could make it to New York, came to hear the highly touted newcomer. As
Horowitz remembered it, there were, seated in the audience with arms crossed
and show-me attitude, “Rachmaninoff, Hofmann, Lhevinne, Gabrilowitsch,
Moiseiwitsch, Bauer, Friedman, Levitzki, and I don’t know who else.” Horowitz
said that “after the booboo of I made of the Tchaikovsky, they wanted to see if
I really could play.”

[…]

From Ernst Urchs, manager of the
Wholesale and Concert Department of Steinway & Sons, came a confidential
report to the chief Steinway executives dated February 23, 1928:

Re:
Vladimir Horowitz.
Concert on Feb. 20, 1928, first piano recital in America. Good house, over
$1,400 in box-office sales for first appearance. Great enthusiasm. Some
excellent criticisms. Evidently will make great popular favorite. Marvellous
technician and best critics count him excellent musician as well. Is only 24
years of age and will undoubtedly improve. Personally a very modest, retiring
nature. Amiable and easy to get along with. Has had 12 or 13 orchestra
appearances in the United States since arrival beginning of January, chiefly
with N.Y. Philharmonic, Philadelphia, New York Symphony, St. Louis, etc.
Average fee during season 1927–28 about $500. Reappears United States October to
end of December 1928, at fee of $1,000 less 20% commission to Concert
Management Arthur Judson

[…]

Wherever he played, Horowitz was
anxious to get back to New York and Rachmaninoff. They continued to cement
their relationship. Whenever Horowitz returned to the city after playing
somewhere he immediately got in touch with his friend, and vice versa.

Perhaps the greatest thrill of
Horowitz’s life occurred when he played the Third Concerto with Rachmaninoff
playing the orchestral part at the second piano in the Steinway basement. Horowitz
later said he was so nervous he thought he would die. Also, “He scolded me
again for the octaves in the Tchaikovsky.” Rachmaninoff was impressed with the
way Horowitz took on the Third Concerto and told Greiner so. Rachmaninoff never
had the success with it that Horowitz had, and it could even be that the
Horowitz performances in America made Rachmaninoff rethink the way he himself
played it. At least, in an interview with Philip Ramey in 1977, Horowitz said
that when Rachmaninoff recorded the Third with Ormandy, around 1940, he kept
asking the conductor during the rehearsals, “Does Horowitz do that? How does he
play this – faster, slower?” Horowitz claimed that Ormandy told him this. “Imagine!”
And Rachmaninoff, when anybody would talk to him about the concerto, would say,
“That’s Horowitz’s.”

To Horowitz, Rachmaninoff was the
greatest of all pianists, “because his playing had such individuality. And such
sound. If you want to get an idea of his sound go to the second movement of his
recording of his First Piano Concerto. I always thought his Beethoven was the
best thing he played, and his Chopin the worst. Rachmaninoff once showed me a
letter from Schnabel, who had heard him play a Beethoven sonata. Schnabel said
it was the best Beethoven playing he had ever heard.”

Rachmaninoff, said Horowitz, was the
eternal refugee, unhappy wherever he was. He remained a Russian, his friends
were Russian, he preferred to speak Russian. Soon he and Horowitz became more
than friends; in many respects Rachmaninoff was a surrogate father, and
Horowitz humbly took his advice and suggestions. Their greatest pleasure was in
playing four-hand and two-piano music:

In his homes in Switzerland
and Los Angeles we played two-piano music together, his suites and Symphonic Dances, the Mozart sonata, and
other things. He wanted to give a two-piano recital with me. There is a
recording of Ashkenazy and Previn in the two suites. It’s a caricature,
absolutely a caricature, terrible.

I have said that to me he
was the greatest pianist, but that does not mean I liked everything he played.
Then again, he did not always like everything I played. I remember once hearing
him in the Moonlight Sonata. When the melody came, he hit the G-sharps boom,
boom-BOOM. Like a trombone, instead of piano or pianissimo. I heard him in his last
years play the Beethoven First Piano Concerto. He made the slow movement sound
like a Chopin nocturne. This was not Beethoven, although I heard him play other
Beethoven things wonderfully, like Op. 111. He had a sense of humor sometimes.
He once learned a few Debussy pieces. Debussy was a composer he never had any
sympathy for, and I asked him why he put the Debussy on his program. “I want to
prove to the public that this is not good music.” Rachmaninoff had to wait a
long time before his Third Concerto became popular. He grew to dislike the
Second Concerto almost as much as the famous C sharp minor Prelude. A lady once
came up to him after a concert, raved over the Second Concerto, and asked him
what inspired him to compose his Second Concerto with those wonderful,
wonderful, wonderful melodies. Rachmaninoff answered her, “Twenty-five rubles.”

Rachmaninoff told Horowitz that he had
technical difficulties all his life. “This is hard to believe, but that is what
he said.” He told Horowitz that every morning for three hours he worked on
scales. “He went to Godowsky to ask for special exercises. He was a gloomy man.
He told me that all his life he had tried to succeed in three things – composition,
piano playing, and conducting – and has succeeded in none.”

Rachmaninoff shunned publicity and
gave very few interviews. Robert Croan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told Horowitz in a 1979 interview that he once asked
Rachmaninoff why? Rachmaninoff said, “Well, you know, Mr. Croan, I was brought
up never to lie. But I cannot tell the truth.”

Horowitz once asked Rachmaninoff what
his most memorable musical experience had been. This, said Horowitz, was a man
who had known Anton Rubinstein, had known Tchaikovsky, had played everywhere
and with everybody.

“I was on tour in Russia with Fedya,”
Rachmaninoff said. Fedya was Feodor Chaliapin. “I was his pianist and we gave a
concert in the Crimea. Fedya sang a group of my songs on this program. After
the concert a little man with a beard came backstage and said to Chaliapin,
‘You are fantastic.’ Then he came to me and said, ‘Mr. Rachmaninoff, nobody
knows you but you will be a great man one day.’ The little man was Chekhov.”

After his first season in America
Horowitz realized that he probably would never have to worry about money again.
“I could trace the course of my career by the summers. Every summer I took a
vacation in Antibes. The first summer I walked around on foot. The second
summer I could afford a bicycle. The third I went around in an automobile – a
Studebaker, which I had purchased in America and shipped back to Europe.”

9. ''King of
Kings''

In the United States I
played private concerts at the homes of the very rich people. In Chicago, for
instance, I was engaged by Cyrus McCormick. I played half an hour, everybody was
drunk, and I got my $5,000, over twice as much as for my concerts. The
millionaires those days could afford it. Today that kind of thing has
disappeared.

Vladimir
Horowitz, 1987, on his early years in America

Now Horowitz had achieved his dream.
He was internationally famous, he was regarded with awe by his peers, and he
got reviews that were the envy of the profession. Constantly being interviewed,
he impressed journalists as a happy, well-adjusted man, always nattily dressed
and color coordinated. No matter how stupid or stereotyped the questions, he
answered them patiently, generally saying much the same things in different
cities: how he played for Scriabin, how much he liked America, what he thought
of American orchestras, and the like. Never did he have anything provocative to
say, yet he always was good copy because he so obviously enjoyed the attention
he was getting and was so willing to cooperate with the musical press. From his
earliest years Horowitz understood the value of publicity.

He watched his fees go up. This was
particularly gratifying. Horowitz equated success with his fees, and he was
getting big ones. In the days of the Great Depression, when a family man was
thrilled to be making $1,000 a year, Horowitz earned $1,500 a concert, and he
was giving many concerts. Between 1928 and 1935 he played nearly 350 times in
America alone. He would also crisscross Europe every year, generally in the
autumn and spring, finishing off his season with a May or June recital in
Paris.

In America the excitement about
Horowitz was such that it even permeated a not very musical White House.
Horowitz was invited to play there for the President Hoover on January 8, 1931.
Over half a century later his memory failed him on that event:

I seem to have drawn a complete
blank on that concert. I remember that I played a white piano, not a good one, and
that when I was received by the president I said, “I’m delightful,” not, “I’m
delighted.”

On his program were Bach-Busoni, the
Hummel Rondo, Dohnányi, Chopin, and the Carmen
Variations.

One index to an artist is the kind of
audience he draws. Horowitz always attracted the professionals as well as a
general audience. It was noted that, especially when he played in New York or a
cosmopolitan European city, his concerts drew in every musician in the
vicinity. In the audience of his Carnegie Hall concert of January 22, 1931, was
a musical Who’s Who including Rachmaninoff, Hofmann, Milstein, Carl Friedberg,
Benno Moiseiwitsch, Egon Petri, Walter Gieseking, Mieczyslaw Munz, Mischa
Elman, Jacques Thibaud, Paul Kochanski, and Felix Salmond. Horowitz said that
so distinguished and ultracritical an audience never frightened him. He
welcomed the challenge.

[…]

It did not take Horowitz very long to
like America very much. But, as a newcomer to the West and, especially,
capitalistic America, one thing at that time he could not understand was
business. After his first touring years in the United States and Europe, and
with the help of a recording contract, he said, he cleared $100,000. A friend
who was a financial adviser took him to a broker so that he could invest in
stocks. “What does this mean, invest?” Horowitz wanted to know. “I didn’t know
what it meant. You make money, you spend it, like in Russia. But in America you
had to invest. So the money was invested. So I lost $70,000 in the famous crash
of 1929. I had to start all over again. I said I would never buy a stock again,
and I never have.”

After that, Horowitz put whatever he
made into a savings account. Much of that money he used to buy art. Horowitz,
Milstein (who painted in his spare time and was a connoisseur), and the
conductor Vladimir Golschmann (who had a collection of Picasso and Braque)
often went to galleries together. Horowitz also picked the brains of other
experts and dealers. The pieces he bought, Horowitz said, ended up a much
better investment than the stock market.

“I bought fantastic pictures through
the years,” he said. “Always I went to the major galleries and spent hours
looking. I had a big Picasso from the White Period, a Manet, a Monet, a Renoir,
a Modigliani, a Degas pastel, a Rouault. It was much harder to find them than
to buy them, and then it had to be proved they were authentic. Some paintings I
bought against the advice of dealers. I paid $5,000 for them. Suddenly they were
worth $100,000, and I sold them.” The Picasso was a large painting that
dominated the living room. When Horowitz bought it, Toscanini came to look at
it and wanted to know how much it cost. Horowitz said $23,000. Toscanini said,
“All artists are crazy.” In the sixties, when Horowitz sold most of his
collection, the Picasso alone brought $750,000.

[…]

The New York managers thought they
knew everything American musical tastes. They discouraged their artists from
presenting what they in their infinite wisdom considered “difficult” music, or
problematic music, or anything except the well-tried, popular classics. Before
World War II, when Horowitz was on the Community Concerts series, he was
constantly being asked to change his programs. “In one city they asked me not
to play Chopin’s G minor Ballade. They thought it was too difficult for their
audience. I played it anyway.”

[…]

Horowitz never had a wildly adventurous
repertoire, but he defied his managers and played such composers as Prokofiev
and Medtner. Even the Brahms Paganini
Variations were suspect by the all-knowing managers. Horowitz had the piece in
his repertoire and played it anyway, up to 1943, then he dropped it
permanently. Later audiences would have given a great deal to hear Horowitz play this
brilliant test of a pianist’s technique and musicianship. Incidentally, like
many pianists of the day – Claudio Arrau, for example[9]
– Horowitz did not always play all of the variations; and when he did, they
were not in Brahms’s order: he generally started with Book II up to the last
variation, then went to Book I, and then returned to Book II for the final
variation. (He never played the Brahms Handel
Variations, by the way.)

In 1931 he had Stravinsky’s Petrushka, seven Brahms waltzes, the
Hummel E flat Rondo (an effective, charming piece he probably picked up after
hearing Friedman play it), and the Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 3 on his
programs. In those days he was also playing Liszt’s E major Polonaise and music
by Szymanowski. He played the Liszt Dante
Sonata in 1934, and that was a virtually unknown piece in those days[10].
He had some Ravel in his repertoire.[11]
In 1943 and 1944 he came up with a piece nobody
knew – the Ricordanza Variations by Czerny.
He introduced to America three Prokofiev sonatas, he played the world premiere
of the Barber Sonata in E flat minor, and he played music by Kabalevsky and
Jelobinsky. Horowitz stood up to the managers very well. But after 1945, as a
matter of choice and not managerial Diktat,
his programs began to be more and more conservative.

[…]

When Hitler started coming into power,
Horowitz after 1932 refused to play in Germany.

England remained unconquered by
Horowitz until 1930. He had played there once previously, in 1927. The 1927
concerts did not go very well. Horowitz appeared twice, once in Albert Hall, which
he said was too big, and once in Aeolian Hall, which he said was too small.
Albert Hall, which seated about seven thousand, had terrible acoustics and an
echo. It was said of this hall that you could hear two concerts there for the
price of one.

When Horowitz went back to England in
1930, it was to play the Rachmaninoff Third with Willem Mengelberg and then record
it with Albert Coates. It was Horowitz’s first concerto recording. The
performance and recording startled the British critics and public, who made a
major revaluation of not only Horowitz but also of the Rachmaninoff work.

Two years later, when Horowitz made a
tour of England, he sold out everywhere and gained one of his most ardent
critical supporters, the celebrated Neville Cardus of the Manchester Guardian. Cardus, who was held to be one
critic sans peur et sans reproche,
went his American colleagues Gunn and Devries one better. He wrote a review
flatly calling Horowitz the greatest pianist “alive or dead.” He was promptly
deluged by mail from fans of Backhaus, Petri, Cortot, and Rachmaninoff. Others
asked him if he had heard Liszt. In a long article written some years later,
Cardus defended his statement.

If anything, he wrote, his initial
reaction had been an understatement. “Horowitz must be regarded as the perfect
pianist.” He had everything – tone, technique, rhythm, sensitivity. “The ensemble of these attributes has
convinced me not once but often that as a pianist pure and undefiled he has no
peer in his time, to say the least. There has never been a romantic pianist of
more than Horowitz’s purity of style and pride of carriage.” Cardus followed
this with about a thousand words of analysis, concluding with, “He brings no
portentous message to us from the high gods of music – only rare musical
pleasure, beautiful colors, patterns that engage the mind and delight the
senses.”

Cardus was also responsible for
passing on a delightful anecdote about a Horowitz rehearsal with Beecham. They
were working on the Tchaikovsky for a performance due to be performed on
November 10, 1932. At one point Beecham stopped his players and said, “Mr.
Horowitz, really, you cannot play like that. It is incredible, not permissible.
My orchestra cannot live up to it.”

[…]

10. Marriage

After we were married Wanda
told me that she had made up her mind that I was the man for her. She discussed
it with her father, who listened sympathetically and said only, “You will have
a difficult life. You will be marrying an artist. Marrying an artist is very
difficult.” Wanda knew that. Her mother’s life was a good example. She had to
put up with all of Toscanini’s rages, stubbornness, schedules, intolerance,
egoism, and infidelities.

– Vladimir
Horowitz, discussing his marriage

In 1933 Vladimir Horowitz, at the age
of thirty, surprised everybody, perhaps even himself. He married Wanda
Toscanini, the daughter of the most celebrated of all conductors. The public
was delighted. It seemed to be a marriage that was Hollywood come to life: the
union of the most admired young pianist of his generation – handsome,
athletic-looking, elegant – and the striking, sultry daughter of the man most
musicians at that time would unhesitatingly have called the greatest conductor
who ever lived.

But there were those who were
dumbfounded.

If ever a man seemed destined for
bachelorhood it was Vladimir Horowitz. He always had lived a carefree life,
relishing his freedom. And, of course, his sexual preferences were no secret to
the musical world. Horowitz preferred men. Thus there was a certain amount of
know-it-all smiles when the engagement was announced. Was it a marriage of
convenience? Or, perhaps, was it a desire to be a member of the Toscanini family
and sit at the feet of Maestro? There were those who honestly believed that
Horowitz was more interested in having Toscanini as his father-in-law than in
having Wanda as a wife. Horowitz had played under the old man’s baton and, like
all musicians, had been swept away by his authority, his ear, his understanding
of musical form, his personal and musical dynamism. And Horowitz knew that
Toscanini had a high opinion of his piano playing; the conductor had made no
secret of his admiration for the brilliant virtuoso.

Thus, when Wanda showed interest in
Horowitz, he was ripe for capture. He did want to settle down and, as it turned
out, he did develop strong emotional attachment to Wanda, a woman who had been
trained to take care of another brilliant and temperamental musician, one
Arturo Toscanini.

[…]

It was in Milan later in 1933 that
Horowitz and Wanda got to know each other. At La Scala he had played both the
Brahms B flat and the Rachmaninoff D minor in one evening, an endurance contest
he would never think of doing later on. […] She began to see Horowitz on a
regular basis. They spent several days together, and on one occasion Horowitz
reached into a pocket, took out a box, opened it and put a gold chain around
her neck. Things were obviously getting serious. On October 8, 1933, their
engagement was announced, and the next day the newspapers carried the story.

[…]

Wanda went with Horowitz on his
English tour in 1933, with her sister, Wally, as chaperone. Wally, who had married
Count Emanuele Castelbarco in 1930, was amused. She said Horowitz was charming,
like a mischievous child. The marriage took place in Milan on December 21,
1933. The Toscaninis were there, and so was Gregor Piatigorsky (Milstein was on
a concert tour and could not attend).

[…]

Whenever he was in New York, Horowitz
tried to spend as much time with Toscanini as possible. Toscanini lived in a
mansion overlooking the Hudson River in Riverdale, just north of Manhattan.
Horowitz and his bride were constant visitors. “He and I got along all right,”
said Horowitz:

We constantly talked about
music. Mozart was a special subject. At that time he did not conduct many
Mozart concertos, mostly because pianists those days played at best only two or
three of them – generally the D minor [K. 466 – Ed.] or the A major [K. 488]. I
had not played any in public. But both of us knew all of the major Mozart
concertos and loved them. I own scores of the concertos with Maestro’s markings
and metronome indications. Of course we discussed Beethoven. I remember him
saying to me, “Horowitz, I know you don’t like to play many of the Beethoven
sonatas, especially the last ones, because you think they are badly written for
the piano by a deaf man. Why don’t you make changes? What is wrong if you make
the changes in good taste? We conductors always change Beethoven’s scoring in
the symphonies and nobody, the critics, the audience, nobody hears the changes.”
I told Maestro that conductors could make those slight changes, but in a
Beethoven sonata if the pianist changed one little note everybody would scream
“This is not in the text!” But Toscanini kept asking me to make changes for
better pianistic solutions of the text. “What do you care about what they say?”
he would ask. But I never had the nerve.

Another thing they talked about was
pianists of the past who had played with Toscanini or whom Toscanini had
personally known. Horowitz especially wanted to hear about Busoni, and was
pleased to learn that Toscanini had a high opinion of him. Toscanini, said
Horowitz,

was crazy about him as a
person and as a musical thinker. But Wanda tells me that Toscanini once heard
Busoni play the Waldstein and at the
opening measures walked out of the hall. There too many tempo changes. Yet
Busoni visited Toscanini at the Ansonia Hotel before World War I and played
Liszt for several hours, until three o’clock in the morning, and Toscanini, who
did not like Liszt, said it was divine. He said he never heard anything better.
And Toscanini was difficult, very, on pianists.

Another thing that Busoni
did that impressed Toscanini was at one of the Sunday evening concerts at the
Metropolitan Opera. The official piano there was a Knabe, and it was an old,
decrepit instrument used by several pianists and accompanists who preceded
Busoni on the program. Toscanini said that when it was Busoni’s turn to play,
everybody thought he would have the instrument changed. But no. Busoni played
the Knabe and Toscanini said that he made it sound like the greatest of all
pianos. Busoni could be very eccentric. In Berlin he was played an Emperor that was piano and pianissimo
from beginning to end. He explained that he was curious to hear how it would
sound that way.

[…]

Through the bad sound in both
recordings [of Brahms’ D minor Concerto, 1935 with Toscanini and 1936 with
Walter – Ed.] comes a blazing, even blistering, conception. Without ignoring
the musical elements, Horowitz makes a lithe, athletic virtuoso piece out of
the concerto. This is an exciting and impulsive Brahms, fast and brilliant, a
damn-the-torpedoes performance that is quite likely the only one of its kind.
It is even – rare for Horowitz – not entirely clean; the first-movement octaves
are smudged and overpedaled. But Horowitz, for better or worse, makes the
Brahms D minor sound like a new experience, and it is hard not to respond to
the visceral excitement he generates. No pianist who has played this
notoriously difficult work has displayed such rhythmic impetus, fantastically
clean articulation (forget about the octaves), and sheer power.

The Walter performance is more relaxed
than Toscanini, who did not give his soloist much, if any, breathing space. Walter,
in the Adagio movement, let Horowitz bring out some of the inner voices that
Brahms so carefully marked and so many of today’s pianists so carefully ignore.
Milstein heard one of the Walter performances and Horowitz was pleased that his
friend, who always spoke his mind and could criticize him severely, said it was
one of the greatest performances of the concerto he had ever heard.

These two performances of the Brahms D
minor Piano Concerto point up the differences between tempos then and tempos
now. The last five decades have seen tempos becoming slower and slower. Toscanini
and Horowitz performed the concerto in 38 minutes, 56 seconds. The
Walter/Horowitz performance comes in at 40 minutes, 42 seconds. By today’s
(1992) standards, those tempos are not only alarmingly fast; they also will be
considered unmusical in many quarters. Toscanini set the tempos for all of his
performances. Walter could be more flexible when working with a soloist.

It is hard to come by accurate timings
of concert performances in the 1930s, but the fact that neither Downes nor
Gilman complained about the tempo of the Brahms in their reviews, or even
mentioned it, suggests that in the mid-1930s the Toscanini and Walter
approaches were the norm. Three decades later, in the mid-1960s, such pianists
as Rudolf Firkusny, Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, and John Ogdon were timed
at between 44 and 46 minutes. In the 1980s Krystian Zimerman, Daniel Barenboim,
and Claudio Arrau were running from 48 to over 50 minutes. At those tempos the
Brahms D minor Concerto sounds like a different piece from the one that
Horowitz with Toscanini and Walter had played fifty years earlier.

Horowitz said he played the Brahms D
minor Concerto no more than a dozen times between 1934 and 1936, and he forgot
it as soon as he could. “As with the late Beethoven sonatas,” he said, “I admit
its great message, but it is not my kind of music. Rachmaninoff heard the New
York performance on the radio and telephoned me, asking how I could ever play
this awful music. It is poorly orchestrated and poorly written for the piano,
he said. Myself, I enjoyed playing the B flat Brahms much more. It is a better
concerto.”

If Horowitz was not happy with the
Brahms D minor Concerto in 1934, two events occurred later in the year that
took his mind off that work. The fall of that year saw a reunion. Horowitz’s
father managed to get out of the Soviet Union to visit his famous son. And on
October 2 a child, Sonia, was born to Wanda and Volodya.

Horowitz had never lost touch with his
family, and had been in communication with his mother and father ever since he
had left for the West in 1925. Indeed, he was sending them money on a regular
basis. In 1930 Sophie, his mother, had died from peritonitis. Shortly before
the reunion with his son Samuel had remarried, but the Russians, as was their
charming custom, kept his wife hostage in Moscow, where they lived. One of the
first things that Samuel did after embracing his son in Paris was proudly to
show him a photograph of his new wife, a woman considerably younger than he. Horowitz
had been very close to his mother, and that action hurt him very much.

[…]

Shortly after his return to Russia,
Samuel Horowitz was arrested during one of Stalin’s purges. Nobody knew the
reason for his arrest. Nobody ever did in Stalin’s day. Perhaps it was felt
that by visiting his son, Samuel had been contaminated by capitalism. The poor
man was put through hell. Natasha Saitzoff said that when Horowitz’s sister,
Regina, got permission to visit her father in the gulag, he was in so
deplorable a condition that he did not recognize her. He died in the prison
camp.

As for Sonia, she was raised in a
manner guaranteed to create problems when she grew up. As a busy touring
pianist, Horowitz was away from home for long periods. He was also developing
emotional and psychosomatic problems that within a short time would result in a
disappearance from the stage. Wanda had to be with him in those desperate
times. For the first year or so after the birth, Wanda stayed in Milan, taking
care of the baby. Then she joined Horowitz in Switzerland, leaving the child
with a nanny. Wally, the Countess Castelbarco, then living in Milan, would
supervise the nanny. Then Wanda went to America with her husband. She saw Sonia
only intermittently during the child’s first few years. When Toscanini was at
his home in Milan, he too would keep an eye on the child. Or Sonia and her
nanny might stay with Aunt Wally at the Castelbarco estate in Crema, near
Venice; or at the Toscanini summer home in Isolino on Lake Maggiore. “She was
passed around like a package,” Wanda recalled. Under those circumstances, Sonia
could not put down any roots, and her education was hit and miss. Toscanini
loved her – more, it was said by many in the Horowitz circle, than her parents
did. To almost everybody, Toscanini could be a monster. But to Sonia he was the
doting grandfather, doing everything he could to spoil her.

In retrospect, Wanda thought that
Toscanini had a bad influence on Sonia. When she was eight years old he would
keep on telling her how brilliant she was, how wonderful, a real genius who
could do anything. “If you want to play the piano, you will play the piano. If
you want to write music, you will write music. It you want to paint, you will
paint.” Later Wanda was to realize not only how much damage her father had
caused but also how negligent she and Volodya had been as parents.

And during those years of Sonia’s
childhood, her father was going through his own kind of mental anguish. The
result was a physical and emotional breakdown that kept him away from the
public for two years.

11. Disappearance

Up to that point in my life
I had never thought much about myself. I just played the piano. But when you
spend so much time sick in bed it changes you a little bit, and sometimes you
change without realizing it. When I started to practice again I think I found
something different in my playing. I read through much music and started to get
interested in modern composers, which I never had been except of course for
Rachmaninoff, and he was really a nineteenth-century composer. I became
familiar with many composers I had never played, such as Hindemith and
Respighi.

Vladimir
Horowitz, about his first retirement in 1936

It did not take Horowitz many years to
slide from the top of his world into a private hell. In the early 1930s
Horowitz seemed to be blessed with everything – fame, money, looks, health, an
adoring international public, the respect of his peers. Yet Horowitz after
1933, the year of his marriage (which might be more than coincidence), slid
deeper and deeper into a depression to the point where he could not play at
all. The outwardly happy, pleasant, relaxed public figure that the journalists
had been describing started to slither in quicksands of self-doubt and
self-loathing. The years from 1936 to 1938 that saw him away from the public
were a desperate attempt to find himself and save himself.

The first Horowitz disappearance from
the stage – there would be three more in the years to come – started with an
operation in 1936, but that was only the physical part of his problems. The
psychological part was more debilitating. Horowitz was physically and
intellectually drained, and he felt he had played certain works so often “that
I couldn’t hear them anymore, even while my fingers were performing them.”

Occupational fatigue hit him. He began
to hate his concert routine and even his piano. He was dissatisfied with his
progress as an artist, and he took it out on the music. His formerly impeccable
technique began to sound a bit slipshod, and he did not seem interested in what
he was playing. Perhaps, too, his responsibilities as a married man with a
child were more than he could face. It was a classic what-did-I-get-myself-into
reaction from a free-wheeling bachelor new to matrimony and bachelorhood.

Then
in 1936 he decided to have his appendix out.

There was nothing wrong with the
appendix, as the operation showed. But his mother had died six years
previously, at the age of fifty-seven, from peritonitis. There were no
antibiotics in those days. After Horowitz received the letter about his mother’s
death he started brooding and developed intestinal pains. “Of course this was
all psychosomatic, absolutely. But you never know,” said Horowitz in 1987. “Maybe
my appendix was really bad. I was convinced of it.” The chances are that Horowitz
was having his first attack of the colitis that began to plague him in the
1950s. But he made up his mind that his trouble was appendicitis, and he wanted
the offending organ removed.

This was easier said than done. It was
no simple matter to find a surgeon who would operate for no clear medical
reason. Finally he found a doctor in Paris who would cooperate, and the
operation took place in September 1936. “The appendix was clean but the
operation wasn’t. I developed phlebitis, became really sick and was in the
hospital for three months. For almost a year I couldn’t walk and during all
that time I didn’t touch the piano.”

This time his illness was physical,
and there was a great deal of pain, so much so that Horowitz began to wonder if
he would ever be able to play the piano again. He also was still depressed
because of his mother’s death. “So I was a very nervous man at the time. Then
when I started to walk it took months before I felt comfortable again. The
muscles were gone.”

At the beginning of 1937, Horowitz was
still depressed and actually in the mood of throwing in the towel. He and Wanda
discussed the future. He had told her that he had the feeling that he would
never play in public again, that they could live a quiet life while he taught
and composed. Money was no problem. By that time the Horowitzes had more than
enough to spend the rest of their lives in relative luxury.

Horowitz convalesced in Bertenstein,
Switzerland, in a house overlooking Lake Lucerne. Wanda and Sonia were there as
well. Horowitz took the cures at several spas. At one point he and Wanda
visited Toscanini in Salzburg, where Toscanini was conducting several operas. Horowitz
would sit in the garden with his leg on a stool because of the phlebitis.
Toscanini would look at him unbelievingly. “He’s crazy,” he kept saying.
“There’s nothing wrong with him.”

But there was, although it was
something out of Toscanini’s experience.

[…]

In this period he spent a good deal of
time with Rachmaninoff, who was living near him in Switzerland. Rachmaninoff
had cancer and only a few years to live, but still was playing the piano like
the giant he always was. In many respects Rachmaninoff was the perfect pianist.
His fingers were infallible, he had a technique that could match Horowitz’s
note for note, his sound was the music of the spheres, and his interpretations
were animated by the most aristocratic of musical minds. The man had
everything.

In Switzerland, Horowitz and
Rachmaninoff talked endlessly about music, they played four-hand music –
everything they could get their hands on – and he listened to Horowitz and
encouraged him. Horowitz knew that Rachmaninoff was not in good health at the
time, and appreciated his help and advice all the more. “He fussed over me and
begged me to practice. At least an hour a day,” he said. Rachmaninoff was the
stabilizing force in Horowitz’s life during this period. He calmed Horowitz
down, tried to rebuild his confidence and kept urging him to resume his career.

[…]

It seems clear that between 1936 and
1938 Horowitz was suffering from the first of a series of guilt feelings that
afflicted him for his entire professional life and even during his student
days. All his life except for his last five years he was torn two ways: between
being an artist and being an entertainer. He knew how good he was
pianistically, but he had nagging doubts about the way he was employing his
gift. He may have been considered by many the world’s greatest pianist, but had
he prostituted his art? Was he merely pandering to the public by playing his
virtuoso stunts instead of devoting his life to the highest artistic ideals? He
desperately wanted to be recognized as a great musician as well as a great
pianist, but he knew that some of his colleagues and some important critics had
reservations about his ultimate artistry. When he began to have doubts about
himself as a musician, as opposed to a “mere” pianist, the result was a
breakdown that resulted in real and imaginary illness and retirement from the
stage.

[…]

His protracted absence from the stage
inevitably started the rumor factory working overtime. Horowitz was fatally
ill. Horowitz was in a sanatorium. Horowitz was in an insane asylum. The climax
came with the announcement of Horowitz’s death. On vacation in Gstaad in 1938, Milstein
and Horowitz one night were listening to the radio. Suddenly they heard: “Now
you will hear music in memory of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. News of his
untimely death just came in from Paris.” Horowitz said, unnecessarily: “That’s
not true!” Then he said, “But what good publicity!” Papers all over Europe
carried the news, and Horowitz was one of the few people ever to read his own
obituary notices. For days Wanda was on the phone to wire services, newspapers,
and friends, correcting the false report. Horowitz was then deluged with
congratulatory telegrams on his resurrection.

Gradually he worked himself out of his
problems. Rachmaninoff was not his only prop. Horowitz spent some time with
Serkin and the violinist Adolf Busch, who was his father-in-law. They lived in
Basel, and whenever Horowitz dropped in for short visits they would encourage
him, urge him to play, try to build up his ego. Serkin and Horowitz played
four-hand music and discussed pianistic problems. Once Serkin listened to
Horowitz read through the fugue of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. “It was amazing,” said Serkin, “but Horowitz
just took it for granted. I think that at that time he did not have a high
opinion of himself. We tried to tell him how good he was and he seemed
embarrassed.”

Early in 1938 Horowitz started feeling
that he, the keyboard, and the music were as one again. He was making peace
with himself.

Serkin and Busch provided the
jumping-off point. They suggested that a quiet return would be best; that
instead of returning with a blare of trumpets to a major concert hall, Horowitz
should test himself at a benefit concert in Zurich on September 26, 1938,
sharing the program with the Busch Quartet. Horowitz agreed. He chose a Chopin
group – the Polonaise-Fantasy, Barcarolle, and several etudes. Everything went
well. Serkin and Busch told him that he was again in top form, and even
Horowitz agreed that it had not been bad. There followed a few concerts in
France, and soon Horowitz was once again playing everywhere in Europe except
Germany and Italy. Germany was out because of Hitler. Italy was out because
Toscanini’s son-in-law would not have been welcome in the land of Mussolini. Toscanini,
who was a fervent opponent of the regime, was on the Fascist blacklist.

[…]

In 1941 Horowitz rented a house in Los
Angeles. He claimed he had a persistent sore throat, and the California climate
would make him more comfortable. Another unstated reason, most likely the real
one, was to be near the ailing Rachmaninoff. Once again Wanda and Sonia were
uprooted. They joined Horowitz in Los Angeles.

Horowitz and Rachmaninoff resumed
their close friendship and also the two-piano playing they had left off in
Switzerland in 1937. Their performances went so well that they started inviting
small audiences to listen to them. On June 15, 1942, one member of the audience
at Rachmaninoff’s house was Sergei Bertensson, who later (with Jay Leyda) wrote
a well-researched biography of Rachmaninoff. An expatriate Russian who had been
an arts administrator in St. Petersburg, Bertensson was friendly with
Rachmaninoff and had heard him rave about Horowitz. He never forgot the
concert, which he described in the biography:

Except for members of both
families, I was the sole auditor. The program included the Mozart sonata and
Rachmaninoff’s Second Suite for Two Pianos. It is impossible to word my
impression of the event. “Power” and “joy” are two words that first come to
mind – expressive power, and joy experienced by two players, each fully aware
of the other’s greatness. After the last note no one spoke – time seemed to
have stopped.

At another such evening, Bertensson
heard the two pianists in Rachmaninoff’s own transcription of his orchestral
work the Symphonic Dances. “The
brilliance of this performance was such that for the first time I guessed what
an experience it must have been to hear Liszt and Chopin playing together, or
Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein.”

Rachmaninoff talked very seriously
about the two of them giving a two-piano recital in Carnegie Hall, but because
of his illness, nothing came of the plan. At least Rachmaninoff could hear
Horowitz play the Third Concerto one last time, on August 7, 1942. “One of the
greatest moments I ever experienced on the stage came after I played
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl,” said Horowitz.
“William Steinberg conducted. Over 23,000 people came, and when I finished the
concerto Rachmaninoff came to the stage and said I played it the way he had
always dreamed it should go.” Horowitz was thrilled. But he told friends that
Rachmaninoff was merely being nice. “Of course,” Horowitz said, “he plays the
Third better than I do.”

The Horowitz/Steinberg was never
recorded, but a few happy collectors have a copy of the May 4, 1941,
performance of the Rachmaninoff Third, taken from a New York Philharmonic broadcast
performance with Barbirolli. Presumably it would not have been substantially
different in conception and execution from the “dream” performance that
Rachmaninoff saluted some fifteen months later. It goes at an exceptionally
fast clip, much faster than anybody today would dare to play it. Nor is it
possible to think of a pianist who could, at that tempo, articulate with the
precision that Horowitz brought to it. Yet, with all the speed, Horowitz has
time to dwell lovingly on the lyric elements and shape them with a master hand.
The dash and élan of the finale are breathtaking. If a performance like this
impresses modern listeners as too fast, too virtuosic, it cannot be emphasized
often enough that tempos were prevailingly much faster half a century ago, and
today’s slow tempos actually misrepresent the music.

When Horowitz was notified that
Rachmaninoff was dying – he died of cancer on March 28, 1943, at the age of
seventy – he canceled over a month of concerts except for an appearance with
Toscanini on April 25, and rushed back to Los Angeles to his friend and mentor
for the last time. Rachmaninoff’s last words to Horowitz, a few days before his
death, were “Good-bye. Good-bye. I will not see you again.”

Horowitz was brokenhearted and never
really got over it. Later, when Toscanini died in 1957, Horowitz was shattered,
but not even Toscanini’s passing left the hole in his life that Rachmaninoff’s
death did. Toscanini was a sort of Jehovah to Horowitz, a divine presence who
could be approached only with awe and reverence, fear and trembling.
Rachmaninoff was a friend, a pillar, a surrogate father – and also a colossal
pianist who could talk to Horowitz on equal terms. It was Rachmaninoff who was
Horowitz’s first inspiration when he was a student. It was Rachmaninoff who had
been instrumental in pulling him out of his black depression between 1936 and
1938.

[…]

The most publicized wartime activity
of Horowitz was a concert with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony for the war-bond
drive in Carnegie Hall on April 25, 1943. They were heard in the Tchaikovsky
Concerto, and the concert brought in an incredible sum for those days – $10,190,045.
The concerto was recorded live from the stage. After the concert, Toscanini
went to Horowitz’s dressing room and kissed his hands. Horowitz also played for
such charities as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the American
Red Cross, and Russian War Relief. He even went to naval and military bases and
played for the troops – the A flat Polonaise, Träumerei, and other short pieces he thought appropriate.

In addition, he maintained a busy
touring schedule and worked on a new knock-‘em-dead ending for a program. He
unveiled it at his Carnegie Hall concert on March 28, 1945, when an astonished
audience heard his transcription of Sousa’s The
Stars and Stripes Forever. In this piece, the greatest of all American
marches (the greatest of all
marches?), Horowitz closely followed the score. As he played it, one could hear
fifes, trombones, horns. Horowitz made the piano sound like a brass band. It
was by far the most popular transcription he ever made. At the premiere,
Carnegie Hall all but collapsed from the enormous Horowitz sonorities and the
resulting yells, cheers, and general hysteria. Horowitz later said that the
Sousa arrangement was a precelebration for the oncoming end of the war. A
little more than a month later he played it in Central Park for I Am an
American Day.

[…]

12. In
Horowitz’s Shoes – and Tails

[…]

A significant change in Horowitz’s
life-style occurred in September 1945, when he bought a town house on East
Ninety-fourth Street near Central Park in New York. To pay for the house, which
cost about $35,000 (when he died in 1989 it would have been worth about $2.5
million), he sold his collection of Fabergé pieces and Russian painted lacquer
boxes. Now, for the first time, the Horowitz family had a permanent residence.

But Sonia was not a regular member of
the family. She spent most of her time away from home. First she attended a
convent school, where she was allowed home only on weekends. Then she was sent
to the George Junior Republic School, near Ithaca, where, Wanda said, there
were many disturbed children, although she did not realize it at the time. Sonia
would come home for vacations, a young rebel, smoking, using foul and abusive
language. She was a most unhappy adolescent, and her parents looked at her with
dismay. They did not know how to handle the problem, and the girl was permitted
to go her own way. She played the piano a bit, painted a bit, wrote poetry. She
had talent but never concentrated on anything. In desperation, Wanda sent Sonia
to a psychologist, who was unable to do anything for her.

Wanda, at least, tried to do something
about her daughter. Horowitz, not an understanding father, ran the other way,
retreating into his music.

There was another thing on his mind
that nagged him. The thin-skinned Horowitz was, for the first time,
encountering a breed of music critics who despised the Horowitz approach to
music.

During the 1940s there was a
pronounced change in the nature of the New York music critics – and then of
critics around the country, many of whom took their intellectual guidance from
the New York critics. There also was an equally pronounced change in the way
these new Fauves listened to music.

The older critics in the major cities
started to fade away and then disappear after 1940. These were critics who had
been born in the nineteenth century, were trained in that tradition, and were
thus inherently sympathetic to the Romantic kind of music making that Horowitz
represented.

The new school of critics that
replaced them was trained differently. To them, Romanticism and virtuosity were
dirty words. In the 1940s Mozart and the piano music of Schubert were starting
to be rediscovered, atonalism and serialism began to be the new musical
language, and new values began to shape musical and critical thinking. To this
new age virtuosity was considered vulgar, and any kind of Romanticism was
suspect. The musical text started to become more important than the musical
meaning. Literalism swept the international musical community. It was the
architecture of music that now mattered, not its emotional content.

When Virgil Thomson came to the Herald Tribune in 1940 a new critical
age was inaugurated. Almost to a man the previous generation of important
American music critics had been trained in Germany or were influenced by German
Romantic thought. But Thomson’s milieu was the chic intellectual and artistic
world of Paris in the 1920s. He had been trained not by Rheinberger or Reinecke
but by Nadia Boulanger. His age was the age of Poulenc and Stravinsky, not
Wagner and Strauss.

Formidably brilliant, he brought to
criticism a trenchant, witty style and a large dose of healthy cynicism about
what he called “the fifty pieces” – the standard repertoire pieces that were
played over and over season after season – and “the business of music.” He had
relatively little experience with concert life, he frequently reviewed music
that he was hearing for the first time (Die
Meistersinger, say, and a good deal of the standard repertoire), and thus
he had no icons to worship. In a short time he shook up the American musical
establishment, striking out at such sacred cows as Toscanini (an example of the
“wow” technique), Sibelius (“vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all
description”), Heifetz (“silk-underwear music”) and, above all, Vladimir
Horowitz.

[…]

The fact is that Horowitz represented
everything Thomson did not like about Romantic performance practice. Obviously
he considered the pianist an intellectual lightweight, and in review after
review from 1942 onward he called Horowitz such things as “a master of
distortion and exaggeration” interested only in “wowing” the public.

On April 9, 1946, Thomson wrote a
critique taken as gospel by many of the new generation of music critics.

In this article Thomson conceded the
pianist’s technical mastery and the real excitement that he provided. Despite
all that, “Horowitz’s playing is monotonous and more often than not musically
false. He never states a simple melody frankly. He teases it by accenting
unimportant notes and diminishing his volume on all the climactic ones. The
only contrast to brio that he knows is the affettuoso [affected] style.” In the
New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, Michael Steinberg cribbed Thomson in his Horowitz entry with the
statement, “It is nearly impossible for him to play simply, and where
simplicity is wanted, he is apt to offer a teasing, affettuoso manner or to steamroll the line into perfect flatness.”

The New Grove was published in 1980, and Steinberg could have backed up
his Thomson-based assessment with some of the Horowitz performances of the late
1970s. Horowitz was going through a bad period at that time. But it is
difficult to find in Horowitz’s playing during the 1940s the kind of
“distortion” that Thomson heard. There could be tension verging on neuroticism;
there could be a few liberties; there could be fluctuations of tempo not
specifically marked in the music. But the liberties and fluctuations were
common nineteenth-century practice, and one can only conclude that Thomson did
not know much about nineteenth-century Romantic style, and probably would not
have responded to it if he did. Always a Francophile, he was oriented toward
the clear, objective, lucid French style rather than the generous, colorful
Slavic style. His ideal of a fine pianist was E. Robert Schmitz, a French
musician completely forgotten today. Another Horowitz basher, B. H. Haggin,
took a minor pianist named Webster Aitken as his ideal of music making.

Thus Horowitz started to get bad
reviews. […] Some critics in Europe and the United States objected strenuously
to Horowitz’s musical approach when he played the German classics (which were,
in any case, only a fragment of his repertoire).

The irony is that the charges the
critics brought against the Horowitz approach to Beethoven would have
disqualified Beethoven himself as a pianist. Beethoven’s own way of playing was
described by Anton Schindler and Carl Czerny, two of Beethoven’s associates who
went into great detail about his style – about his metrical freedom, his
constant fluctuation of tempo, his rubato, his extreme dynamics. Horowitz,
incidentally, had read Schindler and Czerny. One wonders if Thomson had.

Then there was an element of cultural
snobbism that swept the international musical life. One heard such comments
about any musician as, “Oh, yes, it’s all very well that he plays Rachmaninoff,
Liszt, and Scriabin. But how can we tell how good a musician he is until we
hear him play Mozart and Schubert?” Anyone who timidly suggested the reverse –
“Oh, yes, he plays Mozart and Schubert very well, but how good a musician can
we tell he is until we hear him play Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Scriabin?” –
would have been branded a musical yahoo. Yet it takes just as much imagination,
skill, and inner resource to play Liszt well as to play Mozart well. Perhaps
more, considering how few great Liszt pianists we have today compared with the
large number of Mozart pianists (though a strong case can be made that today’s celebrated
Mozart specialists are stylistically wrong in their rigid, literal approach).

[…]

The concerto appearance [Tchaikovsky’s
First with Szell in January 1953 – Ed.] was followed by a Carnegie Hall recital
on February 25. The program contained two works Horowitz had never played in
public – Schubert’s posthumous B flat Sonata and Scriabin’s Ninth. The Schubert
and Scriabin pieces had been tried out in recitals around the country but were
really programmed with New York in mind. The Schubert was a deliberate
challenge. Horowitz was going to show the public that Serkin and the younger
generation (who adored the last three Schubert sonatas) had no monopoly on the
B flat Sonata.

The attempt misfired. The audience
loved it, but the Schubert was not well received by critics and many of
Horowitz’s colleagues. It ran counter to everything learned musicians
understood as correct Schubert playing. It was full of nuances that were
considered excessively Romantic, and Horowitz was in effect advised by his
critics to stick to music he knew something about.

The reviews came as a shock to him. Horowitz
had put a great deal of thought and work into this interpretation and believed
he had something legitimate to say about the music – as indeed he did. Some
years from now, when performance practice of the 1820s has been more thoroughly
analyzed, the Horowitz recording of the posthumous Schubert B flat may well
stand out as the poetic, imaginative performance it is.

Horowitz at that time was on one of
his manic-depressive swings. Despite the animal excitement he could still bring
to his music, he was tired, bored, and, as Pfeiffer noticed, nervous. He became
prone to tantrums. He also thought he was starting to suffer from colitis, and
that terrified him. An attack during a performance would have been too
embarrassing for him to bear. He became moody and depressed. His repertoire
shrunk. Horowitz-watchers noticed that the same pieces were turning up year
after year with distressing regularity. One wondered how many times he could
play the Chopin G minor Ballade or A flat Polonaise without going through them
as a boring, mechanical exercise.

Horowitz took care of the problem his
own way. Not very long after the Silver Jubilee [25 years from the US debut –
Ed.] concerts he disappeared, not to be seen on the concert stage for another
twelve years.

13. The Lazy
Life

Twelve years: 1953 to 1965. For twelve
years the most popular pianist since Paderewski hid, in effect, behind closed
doors. The public knew he was alive because occasionally a new recording
appeared, but after a while the name of Vladimir Horowitz began to mean less
and less. The feeling in musical circles was that he would never play again.
His friend Abram Chasins told all within hearing that Horowitz was finished,
dead in the water. To everybody, it was a mystery. What tremendous force was it
that could paralyze so great a pianist at the height of his career?

Eventually Horowitz gave reasons for
his long retirement, but those were long after the fact and nowhere near the
full story. During his years away from the public he lived quietly, seldom
leaving his house, and not until he was ready to play again did he give the
world an idea of what had gone through his mind.

The official Horowitz explanation was
given in an interview twelve years later with Howard Klein of the New York Times, which appeared on May 9, 1965.
“For thirty-three years,” Horowitz told Klein, “I traveled – thirty-three years
of sitting on trains and going to some small towns. I can’t read on trains
because the movement bothers my vision. I get there early for the concert and
go to a movie. Believe me, I was tired of all this.” Many busy touring artists
go through a similar experience. They begin to feel like trained monkeys on a
treadmill, performing the same tricks over and over again, unable to relax or
find pleasure in what they are doing. After a while they just go through the
motions, to the detriment of their art.

Thus Horowitz was talking honestly to
Klein, and his rationale was true enough as far as it went. In 1953 he was
bored: bored with music, bored with the routine of travel-hotel-concert-travel-hotel-concert,
bored with himself and with his audiences.

But more. The pattern of 1936–38 was
repeating itself. Again there was a search for identity. Again there was
self-loathing mixed with self-pity. The bad reviews he received for the
Schubert B flat had shaken his self-confidence, with perhaps a childish
automatic reaction: “They don’t like me? I’ll show them! They’ll be sorry when
I’m dead.”

So again there was the chasm between
what Horowitz was and what he secretly wanted to be. He was torn two ways, and
the result was a severe emotional disturbance.

[…]

What Horowitz wanted more than
anything was to be accepted as a great musician rather than a flashy virtuoso.
Yet, he found, he was not strong enough to keep away from the flashy kind of
music his public demanded as the last piece in his recitals. So, as always, he
gave the public what it wanted.

Horowitz blew his dilemma all out of
proportion. Romantic pianists of his generation (and of today for that matter)
nearly always ended a recital with a piece of pyrotechnical splendor. It was
not a law writ on tablets, however, and Horowitz could have played whatever he
pleased. But for some reason he refused to realize that his public would gladly
take whatever he offered it, anything from Scarlatti to Rachmaninoff, anything, as proved when he dropped the
virtuoso stunts from his repertoire.

But instead of scrapping the kind of
music that had become offensive to him, he simply quit altogether.

There was one other deep-seated reason
for the retirement that he did not publicly discuss. In the early 1950s he
began having intestinal spasms, which were diagnosed as colitis. That would be
enough to scare any public figure. Horowitz’s problem was known to his friends,
and some shrugged it off as psychosomatic. But Jack Pfeiffer sometimes saw
Horowitz doubled up in pain. “It was real. There was no nonsense about it,”
said Pfeiffer. “He was sick and he was afraid he was going to get sicker.”
Giving concerts with that ailment was an impossibility for Horowitz. Suppose he
had an attack on stage? Even worse, suppose he cramped up while he was playing
a concerto?

[…]

For the first six months or so he sat
at home, sulking and brooding, not even touching the piano. Wanda did her best
to give him the peace of mind he so obviously needed. Then friends started to
visit. Among them was the ever-faithful Milstein, who would drop in and try to
cheer Horowitz up whenever he was in New York.

“People say I was Horowitz’s closest
friend,” said Milstein. “This is not exactly true. Horowitz was like a brother
to me, and that is a different thing. Friends give and take from each other.
Volodya took but did not give. That was the way he was made, and I accepted it,
the way a man accepts the faults of a brother he loves.”

It was an observation that others in
the Horowitz circle would endorse. You had to accept Horowitz for what he was.
He was entirely self-centered, in love only with himself and the piano.
Pfeiffer, always in constant attendance to Horowitz, said, “I don’t think he
had feeling for anyone.” Much the same could be said about Wanda’s relations
with people.

[…]

The lazy life of the first year of the
Horowitz retirement could not last forever. Canasta was fun, and so was
watching television and fooling around at the piano. But eventually Horowitz
got bored with doing nothing, and he began to work himself into the mood for
serious playing and teaching.

[…]

14. Uncashed
Checks

I can play you a beautiful
tone with my knuckle. No, really. A beautiful tone! What does it mean? Nothing.
Meaning comes from the way one, two, three, four, five tones are connected with
one another. And this is the melodic line, what the pianist must achieve on a
percussive instrument. Not easy!

– Vladimir
Horowitz to Tom Frost, his record producer, and to all of his pupils

[…]

During the early years of Horowitz’s
retirement, Jack Pfeiffer became Horowitz’s confidant, and they would generally
have dinner once a week. After a while Horowitz began to talk with Pfeiffer
about making records, but only if the recording technicians would come to him. There
was precedent for this kind of action. As early as 1905, in the Paleolithic age
of recording, the HMV engineers packed up their equipment and brought it from
London to Adelina Patti’s castle in Wales, where the great soprano made her
records. But an artist needs extraordinary clout for this kind of
high-handedness. Patti had that clout. So did Vladimir Horowitz. To RCA he
still was (at that time, anyway), in the jargon of the trade, a valuable property.

Thus started the series of Horowitz
recordings at home.

Horowitz had been looking around for
interesting things to play. In a 1965 interview with Abram Chasins, Horowitz
said that in a way the period of his long retirement was like going back to childhood.
Now he had the time to take a fresh look at literature he had played when
young, including much of the Classic repertoire that he had neglected.

And then, through Wanda, he
rediscovered Clementi. She had found a volume of Clementi sonatas while on a
trip to Italy and brought it home.

Horowitz was not unfamiliar with
Clementi’s music, but he had never made a serious study of the composer. This
time it was a revelation. He had his European contacts get in touch with music
dealers everywhere, and before long he had a complete set of all the Clementi
sonatas, many in first editions. “He would sit there evening after evening and
go through all the Clementi sonatas,” said Pfeiffer, who was his page turner.
Pfeiffer found this most unusual. Many supervirtuosos had probably never even
looked at the music of Clementi, unless they had been assigned the Gradus ad Parnassum exercises when they
were children.

Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) was an
Italian-born pianist, composer and teacher – and piano manufacturer, too – who
lived in England most of his life. He was one of the first of the tribe of
international piano virtuosos, and he astounded audiences with his dexterity,
his double notes, and his singing style. In 1781 he and Mozart met face to face
in a “duel” in the court of Joseph II in Vienna. Mozart won the competition; at
least the emperor thought so. Perhaps Mozart himself was not so sure. He wrote
a violent letter back to Salzburg, condemning Clementi’s playing, calling him a
charlatan. Usually Mozart loftily dismissed other pianists. This time he was
disturbed.

In a way, Clementi was the Vladimir
Horowitz of his day. And to Horowitz’s delight there was a taxonomical
connection between him and Clementi. One of Clementi’s most famous pupils was
John Field, the Irish pianist who settled in St. Petersburg. There he taught a
pianist named Alexander Villoing. Villoing taught Anton Rubinstein, who in turn
taught Horowitz’s teacher, Felix Blumenfeld. So there was a Clementi connection
with Horowitz and he boasted about it. Horowitz would cite Beethoven’s interest
in Clementi, and would play sections from the sonatas that anticipated not only
Beethoven but also Mendelssohn, Chopin, and other Romantics. He became fixed on
Clementi and made up his mind to record a group of the sonatas.

When the news of the projected Clementi
record came out, Howard Taubman, then the music editor of the Times, sent a staff critic to interview
Horowitz about it. It was felt by the Times
that the championship of a virtually forgotten composer by the world’s greatest
virtuoso was a legitimate news story. It was also the first interview since
Horowitz’s retirement. The recording was issued in 1955. It was not a
best-seller, but nobody had expected it to be.

[…]

The longer Horowitz remained in
retirement, the more determined he seemed to be to show the world that he could
still play. And, starting with the Clementi disc, he began to record material
he had never before played in America. In 1956 he came forth with a Scriabin
disc that contained the Sonata No. 3 and sixteen preludes, all new to his
repertoire. With this disc, he leaped into the top echelon of Scriabin performers.

[…]

Then, shortly after Toscanini’s death
[on January 16, 1957 – Ed.], the Horowitz family was hit by another blow. Sonia
had been critically injured in a motorbike accident near San Remo on the
Riviera.

Sonia, at that time a young woman of
twenty-three, had been living in Italy, spending much time with her aunt Wally,
who recently had been divorced from Count Castelbarco. Sonia was much closer to
Wally than to her own mother, and it was Wally who probably saved her life. They
were vacationing in the Riviera. Wally and she decided to go to a restaurant for
lunch. Sonia preceded her on her motorbike while Wally went in her own car. On
returning, with Wally in her automobile directly behind her, Sonia tried to
pass a bus on a curve. She went out of control and into a lamppost, was thrown
and suffered a fractured skull. Wally phoned for help, and Sonia was taken to a
hospital. A specialist was called in, and he said that Sonia had to be
transferred to specialists in a hospital in Milan. Wally, exerting here
considerable influence, arranged to get Sonia to Milan on a U.S. Army
helicopter on the grounds that an American citizen had been injured.

In Milan, the specialists found brain
damage. Sonia underwent surgery and pulled through. Wanda, as soon as Wally
notified her of the accident, took the next plane to Milan. Horowitz stayed
home. He may have rationalized that there was nothing he could do, and that he
even would be in the way. But his behavior during such a family crisis caused
friends to wonder just what kind of man he was. Wanda stoutly defended him,
pointing out that at the time he was very sick. Sonia recovered, but Horowitz
thought that she was never the same again. The accident, he firmly believed,
had impaired her mental capacities.

[…]

When Horowitz felt ready to record
again, he went to Hunter College and Carnegie Hall instead of using his home as
a studio. But his relations with RCA were not to last much longer.

Horowitz had been friendly with George
Marek, the vice president and general manager of the RCA Record Division. Their
friendship cooled in 1955, shortly after the Clementi record. Horowitz had put
a great deal of time and effort into it. It had been a labor of love, and he
proudly played the disc for Marek. Marek said, “Oh, yes. Wonderful, wonderful.
But commercially it doesn’t mean anything.” Horowitz found this remark
condescending and insulting. Pfeiffer, who was there, said that “it was like a
pail of cold water in Horowitz’s face.” Marek may not have been tactful, but he
was correct about the merchandising aspects of the discs Horowitz was making.
Neither the Clementi nor the Scriabin records sold very well – certainly not
enough to take care of Horowitz’s $40,000 annual guarantee. And by the early
1960s, Horowitz had not played in public for about ten years and his very name
was being forgotten. Sales of all of his records had severely fallen off. The
bottom-line men at RCA were not happy.

Then RCA did something very stupid.
The company told Horowitz that he should make some records that had “popular
appeal.” Horowitz asked RCA to suggest repertoire ideas. RCA came up with some
remarkable recommendations: the William
Tell Overture, the 1812 Overture,
waltzes. Cocktail pianists could have played this pop stuff just as well as
Vladimir Horowitz. Horowitz said, “Is that all they think of me?” Wanda was
livid.

Horowitz made up his mind to leave
RCA. But before that happened, he was fired. RCA dropped him around 1960, along
with a group of musicians that included Gary Graffman. The Horowitz records
simply were not selling. Graffman did not get the news about Horowitz until he
called him to discuss his own predicament. When Horowitz said that he too had
been dropped, Graffman was stunned. Horowitz suggested that the two of them
open a whorehouse.

Soon after that, Graffman signed with
Columbia and suggested to Horowitz that he get in touch with record executives
there. “Do you really think they would be interested in me?” asked Horowitz,
playing the innocent. Graffman laughed. He called Schuyler Chapin, the head of
CBS Masterworks. “Would you like to have Vladimir Horowitz on your list?”
Chapin instantly got in touch with Horowitz.

Pfeiffer was in Florida on sabbatical
at the time and did not know what was going on. He might have been able to
smooth things over between Horowitz and RCA. But by the time he returned it was
too late. Horowitz had become friendly with Goddard Lieberson, the suave,
imaginative head of Columbia Records, and Lieberson offered him every kind of
inducement to sign with Columbia, which he finally did.

Chapin negotiated a contract with
Horowitz in 1961. Horowitz asked for surprisingly little in the way of an
advance or an annual guarantee. He was content to work largely on royalties
from the sale of individual records. Wanda was in on all the discussions, and
Chapin, as he later said, “rapidly learned that if she had chosen to do so she
could have outmerchandised R. H. Macy himself.” Throughout the negotiations
Chapin had the feeling that Horowitz was “a very shy man, someone who wanted to
know that he was going to be loved, admired, and cared for.” When the contract
was signed, Horowitz turned to Chapin and asked, “Will you take care of me?”
Chapin assured Horowitz that he would.

Thomas Frost was appointed by Chapin
to be Horowitz’s producer. Frost was born in Vienna and came with his family to
the United States at the time of the Anschluss in 1938. He had studied the
violin as a child. In America he studied theory with Paul Hindemith at Yale.
Frost was a thoroughly trained musician, and he and Horowitz became close
friends.

Frost worked on Horowitz’s first
Columbia record, Columbia Records
Presents Vladimir Horowitz, and was the producer for almost all of his
subsequent Columbia recordings. The first record, released on September 24,
1962, contained the Chopin B flat minor Sonata, two of Rachmaninoff’s Etude-tableaux, the Schumann Arabesque, and Liszt’s Hungarian
Rhapsody No. 19 (arranged by Horowitz). It was a typical Horowitz program. He
had previously recorded the Chopin and Schumann for Victor. Now, with a new
company, he could start rerecording some of the major items in his repertoire. The
other pieces on the disc were first Horowitz recordings. Columbia advertised it
heavily, and the record became a best-seller.

[…]

Jack Pfeiffer of RCA thought that
under the circumstances the move to Columbia was the right thing for Horowitz.
It brought some excitement into his life, a sense of purpose, the desire to
work again. Horowitz and Pfeiffer remained the best of friends, and the two of
them would listen to the Columbia records as they came out. Pfeiffer thought
that Columbia was doing a very good job for him, and it was true. On the
Columbia discs the Horowitz sound was less clangorous than the close-up sound
Victor had only too often provided. When they listened to the Horowitz
performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana,
Pfeiffer remembered that his reaction was one of acute jealousy. “Why couldn’t
he have done that for us?”

Chapin was dying to record Horowitz in
the Rachmaninoff D minor Concerto with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra,
but Horowitz would have none of that; he felt he was not ready. His second disc
featured Schumann’s Kinderscenen,
along with pieces by Scarlatti, Scriabin and Schubert. It was released on April
15, 1963. Then came a record with the Beethoven Pathétique, the Chopin B minor Scherzo, and short pieces by Chopin
and Debussy. After that came a disc devoted solely to Scarlatti sonatas. All of
the records were best-sellers. Columbia and Horowitz were very happy.

But still there was no indication that
Horowitz was ready to give concerts.

15. Media
Blitz

It was not until 1962 that Horowitz
began indicating that maybe, maybe,
he would resume his career. When Wanda was asked what she thought, she would
shrug her shoulders and look despairingly at Volodya, who was doing what he
seemed to do best – lying comfortably on his divan.

It was a long hibernation, and
Horowitz could not be pushed. Pushing made him stubbornly react in the opposite
direction. What finally set him moving again was a combination of factors: his
improved physical and mental health, the knowledge that his pianistic skills
had not deserted him, and the appearance of such new Russian heroes as Richter,
Gilels, and Ashkenazy. Pride was involved. Who were these upstarts to challenge
the only one?

And there was a financial reason for
Horowitz to return to work. After twelve years a good part of his savings had
evaporated. He lived as he always had lived – expensively and even lavishly,
with all of his needs taken care of. Toward the end of his retirement some
financial pressure began to be felt, and one year he actually found himself in
debt. So he quietly started selling off his art collection. The Modigliani,
Matisse, and Picasso disappeared from his walls, as did the Degas, Renoir, and
all of the others.

[…]

Horowitz had the itch. But he was still
torn two ways. On the one hand he was not too anxious to return to the rigors
of concert life – the traveling, the discomfort, the fear of memory lapses, the
critics, and all the other pressures. There was also his colitis, seemingly
cured, but could he be sure? On the other hand he missed his public. He knew he
could play as well as ever, and could give the new heroes something to think
about.

Julius Bloom, the executive director
of Carnegie Hall, helped him come to a decision.

At Wanda’s suggestion, Horowitz
approached Bloom toward the end of 1964. He wanted to play on the stage of
Carnegie Hall to see if he felt comfortable enough for a return to concert
life, and he asked if such a thing would be possible. Bloom immediately made
all the arrangements.

Horowitz and Bloom soon became
friends. Bloom was a thoughtful man, trained in sociology and philosophy, a
visionary, knowledgeable about music, experienced in all of the ins and outs of
the music business. Bloom felt – or, as he later said to a journalist, he knew – that Horowitz wanted to return.
The more Horowitz insisted that he did not
want to return, the more Bloom knew that he did. But never once did he try to
push Horowitz into playing. “That would have stopped everything then and there.
He needed to be persuaded, to be oozed in.”

[…]

The “oozing” process took place on
selected afternoons on the stage of Carnegie Hall. Starting on January 7, 1965,
Horowitz played a number of secret rehearsals until April for a tiny,
handpicked audience. Meanwhile Bloom reserved Carnegie Hall for a May 9
concert.

All of this was a well-kept secret. “I
knew that the last thing Horowitz wanted was publicity,” said Bloom. At the
first Carnegie Hall tryout Bloom was of course present. “We all sat there
stunned while he played. It was absolutely fantastic.” The most thrilled person
in the tiny audiences was Wanda. She, like Bloom, knew better than to try to
nail Horowitz to a definite return. All she did was encourage him and tell him
how well he was playing.

[…]

There was hysteria on the announcement
in the Times of the Horowitz return. It
was the start of a media blitz that astonished even veterans who thought they
had experienced everything. Papers from all over the world picked up the Times story. Impresarios from Europe and
Japan immediately requested Horowitz’s services. There was even an official
request from Moscow. Horowitz gave a press interview on March 19 in Carnegie
Hall. This too received international coverage. Horowitz said in effect that he
was a new man. He said he would no longer play flashy transcriptions (though in
1967 he did revive the Carmen
Variations). His programs, he said, would concentrate more on important pieces
and he would program music that had not previously been in his repertoire.

[…]

When it was announced that tickets for
the May 9 concert would go on sale at the Carnegie Hall box office on April 26,
more than 1,500 Horowitzphiles were standing three or four abreast in a line
that extended east from Carnegie Hall down to the Avenue of the Americas on
that day. Some had arrived two days early. Most had camped out overnight. The
first in line got his fifteen minutes of fame; he was Michael Lintzman, a music
teacher from Brooklyn, and he was in all the papers. The weather was terrible –
rainy and cold. Wanda came down the evening before the box-office opening and
looked at the sodden group of Horowitz fans. She immediately went into the Nedick’s
coffee shop on the corner and ordered coffee for all. The lineup outside
Carnegie Hall would be a permanent feature of nearly all future Horowitz
concerts. People would start lining up two days before, and they would expect
to be given coffee by Wanda Horowitz some time during their camping-out period.
Wanda never failed them. And the press never failed her.

Ticket sales were limited to four per
person. Top price was $12.50 (“one of the highest in the history of the
2,760-seat house,” said the Times),
scaled down to balcony seats for $4 and $3. When the box office closed, only
some 300 purchasers had been taken care of. Assuming that each of the 300 had
purchased four tickets, that still left about 1,500 seats unaccounted for.
There was a public outcry and the newspapers started asking questions. Wanda
indignantly said that she had purchased a block of 296 seats, all but eight of
which she had paid for. The Steinway people said they had purchased only 20. What
had happened to more than 1,000 seats? The New York State Attorney General’s
office said there would be an investigation.

In any case, no ticket went to waste.
The hall was sold out, and scalpers were charging outrageous prices for the few
tickets they had managed to locate.

[…]

Now all that remained was for Horowitz
actually to give his concert. The progress of an artist from stage door to the
center of the stage has been described as the longest, loneliest walk in the
world. This entrance would be by far the longest, loneliest walk that Vladimir
Horowitz had ever taken.

16. Still the
Master

May 9, 1965, was a sunny, humid day in
New York. Horowitz went through his usual preconcert routine as though this was
just another performance. But of course it wasn’t. What was going through his
mind? He never said. And nobody asked him. On the day he gave a concert
Horowitz was not to be approached by anybody during his preparations.

For Horowitz, getting ready for a
concert was always more than a normal toilette. I was a ceremony, a
purification rite, even a sort of baptism. On this Sunday, Horowitz got up
around noon, as usual, and had breakfast. Nobody was permitted to speak to him.
After breakfast he washed, shaved and dressed. For his afternoon concerts –
this one was scheduled for 3:30 – he always wore the once-traditional gray
trousers and a swallowtail coat. He was the last pianist alive to do so.

[…]

Shortly before 3 P.M. Horowitz, Wanda,
and Jack Pfeiffer got into a limousine and headed for Carnegie Hall.

Schuyler Chapin and Carnegie Hall
officials were at the stage entrance on West Fifty-sixth Street waiting for
Horowitz to appear. Chapin was fulfilling his promise to take care of Horowitz
during their association. Today he would act as his valet. Also waiting was a
gaggle of reporters, photographers, and television crews. After a while
everybody had palpitations. The hall was full – it had been since 3 P.M. – and
everybody was there except the pianist. Chapin started thinking of what he
would say to the audience if Horowitz had panicked and decided not to show up.
He looked desperately at Goddard Lieberson. Lieberson looked desperately at
Chapin. They stood and waited. There was nothing else they could do.

Horowitz arrived at the Carnegie Hall
stage entrance at 3:25 P.M. for his 3:30 concert. His limousine, he explained
getting out of the car, had got caught in traffic. (Pfeiffer later said this
was true. The area around Central Park, two blocks north of Carnegie Hall, is
always crowded on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.)

Horowitz was immediately surrounded by
media people. He did not seem to be disturbed. Everybody else was still shaking.
Chapin rushed Horowitz to the dressing room, let him warm up for five minutes on
the practice piano there, and escorted him to the wings. Horowitz stood there,
looking bemused. Chapin put his hand on Horowitz’s back and gently pushed him
on to the stage.

The audience stood and roared as the
pianist appeared. Horowitz bowed to the balcony, the boxes, the parquet. Everybody
in the audience was rooting for him and waves of love were radiating through
the hall, as well as waves of anxiety and fear. “I was more nervous,” said Gary
Graffman, “than at any concert I ever gave. Would he come out, look at the
audience, scream and run off?”

Horowitz launched into the Toccata.
With so many professionals in the audience, it was possible to look in any
direction and see moving fingers, pianists playing along with the soloist. Horowitz
hit a particularly exposed wrong note shortly after the opening, and there was
an audible gasp. Later on there were also a few wrong notes. But Horowitz did
not seem bothered, and he calmly went along, singing out the Adagio and
clarifying the part writing of the Fugue as only he could. There was a shout of
approval at the end.

Then came the Schumann C major
Fantasy. Horowitz played the first movement in a rather reflective,
introspective manner. In the second movement he articulated the bold chords
with his old authority. But during the coda there was a moment where he
teetered on the edge of disaster. Schumann was cruel here; the writing calls
for wide, fast jumps in both hands, and few pianists get through it unscathed.
Suddenly Horowitz lost control. It was only for a fraction of a second, but
everybody who knew the piece knew
that Horowitz was going to break down. He didn’t. He recovered, finished the
coda, kept his foot on the pedal, reached for a handkerchief and mopped his
face. Then he started the slow, lovely last movement and played it simply and
beautifully.

The Scriabin Ninth Sonata, spooky and
complicated, was Horowitz at his best. No living pianist could have matched the
color he brought to it, the clarity of the voicings, the identification with
the composer’s diabolical mysticism. It is not for nothing that it is called
the Black Mass Sonata. The shorter
piano pieces also went beautifully. In Chopin’s F major Etude he ended up with
a diminuendo on the four last chords where Chopin’s marking is forte. That
drives purists and many critics crazy. (As a matter of fact, it was common
practice with pianists of the preceding century. Rosina Lhevinne, the widow of
the great pianist Josef and one of America’s best piano teachers, used to refer
to that practice as a “reverse accent”.) The concert ended with Chopin’s G
minor Ballade. This time Horowitz had new ideas about it. But he always had new
ideas whenever he played the piece. He never did figure out exactly how he
wanted it to go, but he chased after it as relentlessly as Lancelot ever sought
the Grail.

Then came the encores, mostly quiet
pieces. The only technical excitement was provided by the Moszkowski A flat
Etude. Horowitz played the scale passages prestissimo, every note clear,
relishing the effect he was making, and at the end there were yips of approval.
This was the old Horowitz. He sang his way through the Debussy Serenade to the Doll and Scriabin C
sharp minor Etude, and at the end there was Schumann’s Träumerei. The audience gave Horowitz a standing ovation. He was
recalled again and again. Finally the house lights were turned on and a
stagehand came out and lowered the keyboard lid.

[…]

Columbia rushed to get out the
recording of the concert. Horowitz kept insisting that this concert was a
historic document, and that he wouldn’t change a note. But he did. Some of the
slips in the Bach-Busoni are on the record, but not the terrifying moment in
the Schumann Fantasy.

Columbia sent a test pressing to the
senior music critic of the Times, who
noticed that the Schumann had been cleaned up. He called Columbia and asked
what had happened. An hour later his phone rang:

“Mr. Schonberg?”

“Yes.”

“This is Vladimir Horowitz. I understand
you have question about my record?”

“The coda of the Schumann…?”

“Yes. Let me explain.”

“Of course.”

“You remember how hot it was in the
hall? And you know how nervous pianists get when they come to the coda? So
while I was playing it, even before I got to the coda, the perspiration run
into my eyes and I could not see the keyboard. So I played blind. So you know
how important records are for posterity. I did not want to be represented by
something that was not my fault. It was an act of God, the heat and the
perspiration. So I corrected the passage after the concert.”

“All very well, Mr. Horowitz. But
Columbia is advertising it as the return of Vladimir Horowitz to Carnegie Hall,
and it isn’t.”

Howard Klein, who had been at the
concert, reviewed the record for the Times.
He noticed that the Schumann performance on the disc was cleaner than he had
remembered. He phoned Horowitz, who said, “Well, they tell me that that’s the
way it was.” Then Klein called the Columbia recording people and asked, “Is
this in fact what happened?” They told him yes, that the disc indeed was the
actual concert. Klein rushed a review into print. Not long after, Klein
discovered that he had been had.

Two years later, when Klein had
another Horowitz disc to review, he brought up the issue of splicing together a
finished product from various tapes and then advertising the result as a live
concert.

The honesty of records had been an
ethical issue ever since magnetic tape recording started to be used after 1948,
the year the LP disc was introduced. Experienced listeners soon learned never
to trust any LP record. The old 78-rpm discs were entirely honest; if an artist
did not like what came out in the playback, there was nothing that could be
done about it. He or she had to record the entire thing over again. Now, with
magnetic tape, a measure or even a single note could be corrected.

In studio recordings, it was expected
that the artist would correct inexact passages. But many innocents continued to
believe that a recording advertised as an actual performance really was
recorded “live” and sold in an unaltered state. Klein mentioned that after his
review of the Horowitz comeback he had learned that the ending of the second
movement of the Schumann Fantasy was not the actual concert performance. “The
question here is one of ethics.” In the case of the comeback disc, why not be
honest and tell what was actually done? For in pretending to be the recording
of a live concert, the disc offered most but not all of the truth.

[…]

17. The New
Horowitz?

Almost four thousand seats!
The house will be only half full! It will be a fiasco! A disaster! A disgrace!

– Vladimir
Horowitz to a journalist about his forthcoming Metropolitan Opera recital

It was a happy and relaxed Horowitz
who faced the world after his 1965 return. He told the press that his long
sabbatical had solved his problems: “Before, I was always aware there was a
public in the hall, and I played to please the public. Times are different now.
Today I play the music I want and I just try to do my best.” He said that now
he was at a point where he had become a free agent. He had no managers. Julius
Bloom took care of his business affairs, and he did exactly what Horowitz told
him to do. “If I want to play in New York, I play in New York. If I want to
play five times, I play five times. I make the decisions.”

He said that he had also simplified
business arrangements by making all the concerts he played single admission.
“They are not part of a series. I also continue to insist on afternoon concerts
because that’s when I’m freshest and I believe it is also the best time for the
audience.” Here Horowitz was working along the lines of the Charlie Wilson
theory. “Engine Charlie” of General Motors had, many years previously, achieved
a kind of immortality with his statement: “What’s good for General Motors is
good for the country.”

The first New York concerts after
Horowitz’s 1965 return were held in Carnegie Hall on April 17 and November 27,
1966. On the programs were pieces either new to his repertoire or that he had
not played for years. The Scriabin Tenth Sonata, Mozart’s Sonata in A (the one
with the “Turkish March”), Beethoven’s C minor Variations (which he had not
played since the early 1950s), and Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, which he had
not played in concert since 1951, were on the April 17 program. On November 27
there were Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann,
Haydn’s F major Sonata (No. 23), Debussy L’isle
joyeuse and three preludes (Bruyères,
Les fées sont d’exquisesdanseuses, and La terrasse des audiences au clair delune), and Schumann’s Blumenstück.

Horowitz was taking
seriously his promise to expand his repertoire. From 1965 to his death
audiences could count on something new at almost every concert. In the next two
decades he programmed for the first time in the United States Scriabin’s Fifth
and Tenth sonatas, several Mozart and Haydn sonatas, Liszt’s B minor Ballade,
Schumann’s Kreisleriana and F minor
Sonata, several Clementi sonatas, Liszt’s Scherzo and March, the Mendelssohn Scherzo a Capriccio, and Schubert’s B
flat Impromptu. He also revived Rachmaninoff’s Second Sonata, which he had not
played since 1948.

Then in 1968 television
entered his life. Horowitz and Luciano Pavarotti were the two most popular,
highly paid classical musicians of their time, and it was inevitable that
Horowitz, like the great Italian tenor, would turn to television.

[…]

At CBS the projected show
was called Project X and had a top-secret tag attached to it because Horowitz
would have been furious had there been a publicity leak. Rehearsals were held
in Carnegie Hall. Special pains were taken to ensure that the highest technical
standards obtained. The floor of the stage was sprinkled with talcum powder to
avoid squeaking. The television crew wore velvet slippers. Programs were
printed on silk so that there would be no rustling. In all, the project cost
CBS about $275,000.

Horowitz watched some of
the playbacks. He was somewhat startled at what he saw. In his interview with Time he said that he had never before
seen a close-up of his hands on the keyboard. “It’s fantastic, but sometimes
the technique is awful. Things I tell my students not to do, I’m doing.” And of
the close-ups of his face: “To me it’s almost an invasion of my privacy.”

The videotape was made by
CBS at Carnegie Hall on January 2 and February 1, 1968. For both tapings the hall
was full, and reviewers were present. The program contained two Scarlatti
sonatas; Chopin’s G minor Ballade (Horowitz’s old friend and adversary), F
sharp minor Polonaise, and F minor Nocturne; the Schumann Arabesque; Scriabin’s Etude in D sharp minor; and, as always,
Schumann’s Träumerei as an encore,
followed by the Carmen Variations.
The TV special was sponsored by General Telephone and Electronics. Called Vladimir Horowitz: A Television Concert at
Carnegie Hall, it went out over the CBS network on September 22, 1968, and
later in the year on Christmas Day.

On this show many music
lovers and piano students were seeing and hearing Horowitz for the first time;
and even those who had watched his playing through the years could see things
not visible in the concert hall – the close-ups of the Horowitz hands, for
instance. There must have been reverberations between teachers and students all
over the country as they watched the fabulous Horowitz doing all the “wrong”
things. In his review, Robert Finn of the Cleveland Plain Dealer was amused at this aspect of the film. “I think,” he
wrote the following day, “this concert should have borne ‘adult only’ label,
for if many piano-looking youngsters get the idea that they should hold their
hands like Horowitz, American piano playing will be set back 50 years.”

[…]

Then, suddenly, only four
years after proudly proclaiming himself a new Horowitz, he disappeared from the
stage. This time nobody seemed to be prepared for it. Could it have been an
adolescent Horowitz response to a bad criticism? Some thought so.

In 1969 Horowitz gave a
recital in Boston and was mauled by the Boston Globe critic. Michael Steinberg, never hospitable to Horowitz,
praised his technique. But his music making? Steinberg repeated what Virgil
Thomson said in the 1940s, citing what he considered the broken lines, the
fussy approach, the “incoherencies.” Steinberg was a literalist very much of
the new school, and his ideal of piano playing centered on such sober,
architecture-minded artists as Alfred Brendel.

Was it cause and effect? Wanda
said no. She said that in Boston he had “an overdose of sunshine” and became
very ill. But that does not sound like a convincing excuse for a long absence.
And, as was quickly pointed out, it was after the bad reviews of his Schubert B
flat Sonata in 1953 that Horowitz disappeared for twelve years.

This time it was not for
twelve years. But Horowitz did not play another concert for almost five years. When
he stopped in 1969 after the Steinberg review he was, all agreed, “a bundle of
nerves,” as Jack Pfeiffer described it. Horowitz made it clear that he was not
going to play in public for the time being. The only thing he seemed to relish
were his Social Security checks (he had turned sixty-five on October 1, 1968).
When they came on the first of the month he cashed them with great
satisfaction.

During his absence from the
concert life, however, he made records for Columbia – five discs over the next
four years. He recorded old repertoire, such as the Beethoven Moonlight and Appassionata, and standard Chopin works. He learned four Schubert
impromptus. He recorded Beethoven’s Waldstein
Sonata and Schumann’s Kreisleriana.
He became interested in a relatively obscure Chopin work, the Introduction and
Rondo (Op. 16). He restudied a few Scriabin pieces.

He also watched the sales
of his records go down. So did the Columbia bottom-line men. With Horowitz no
longer before the public, the public began to forget him. Horowitz’s
association with CBS Masterworks was coming to an end. It was the same pattern
that had occurred at RCA more than a decade earlier.

In 1969 and 1970 he had
psychiatric help and shock therapy, and by 1971 he was nearly back to normal.
He even started an association with Harold Shaw, an experienced New York
concert manager, which meant that although he was not yet ready to resume his
career, he was at least thinking about it.

[…]

When Harold Shaw started
managing the Horowitz concerts in 1974, the pianist’s fee was $11,000. Shaw
soon boosted that to 80 percent of the gross receipts. All of a sudden Horowitz
was making $50,000 and up per concert. It was no great secret, even outside
business. It was also no secret that whoever presented him would almost always
be making money. Pavarotti bragged that nobody ever lost money at one of his
concerts despite his outlandish fee. The same could be said of Horowitz. These
Horowitz concerts were generally billed as special events, with ticket prices
hiked accordingly. The 20 percent that came to the presenter easily covered all
expenses, with a good sum left over. And the Horowitz price went ever upwards. Toward
the end of Horowitz’s career, reports from Europe indicated that he was
clearing as much as $300,000 a concert; and he peaked with his first
appearances in Tokyo, where he got $1 million for his two concerts and the
television rights. When the Japanese public learned about that, they were
enraged: not so much because of the enormous fee but because Horowitz was off
form in 1983 and the Japanese felt that they had been cheated.

Horowitz was once asked
where all the money he made went to. “To Internal Revenue,” he immediately
answered. Horowitz had the reputation of being money-mad. As a matter of fact
he turned down many lucrative offers, refusing for years to play on the radio,
to make sound tracks for films, to appear on television (eventually he did turn
to television, but on his own terms).

As one of his managers
insisted, “It is important to realize that for Horowitz a concert had to be the
right combination of what was interesting artistically to him as well as rewarding
financially. When the balance was right he would do it. He would never do
anything for money alone.”

Or, as Horowitz once said,
“I want to be paid, but I will not be bought.”

The biggest moment in the
year of the Horowitz return came on November 17, 1974, when he gave a concert
at the Metropolitan Opera House. It was the first concert ever given in the
eight-year-old, 3,900-seat auditorium, and also the first New York appearance
by Horowitz in six years. The concert was a benefit for the Met, now being run
by Horowitz’s old friend Schuyler Chapin.

The event also coincided
with the entrance of Peter Gelb into Horowitz’s life. Gelb was with the New
York public relations firm of Gurtman and Murtha. He was a bright, energetic
young man, full of ideas. In 1974 he read about Horowitz making a return in
Cleveland after a five-year absence from the concert stage. Gelb knew Harold
Shaw, and approached him as a representative of Gurtman and Murtha, offering to
get publicity for Horowitz. Shaw was intrigued by the young man’s imaginative
ideas and said that he would engage him through Gurtman and Murtha – if
Horowitz liked him. Horowitz had never had a press agent before and certainly
would not pay for one. Why should he? Everything he did was news. But he was
getting older and, Shaw thought, perhaps would welcome the help of a smart public
relations man who was tactful enough not to get in his way. Certainly Horowitz
had nothing to lose, and if things did not work out Gelb could be dismissed.

[…]

Peter Gelb and Horowitz got
along famously. The first thing Gelb did was organize a press conference in
Horowitz’s living room after his return from Cleveland. The subject was
Horowitz’s projected concert on November 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, and Gelb
whipped up a great deal of press interest in the event. Journalists were
invited by Gelb to the second rehearsal at the Met, and one result was a
front-page story in the Times.
Horowitz was delighted with the publicity, and Gelb officially became his
personal representative at Gurtman and Murtha. That continued for four years.
In 1978 Gelb left New York to work for the Boston Symphony as publicity
director and eventually an assistant manager of the orchestra. Later he would
return to New York and form an even closer association with Horowitz.

The rehearsals at the
Metropolitan Opera were necessary because Horowitz had to make sure that the
acoustics satisfied him. Chapin, after discussions with Cyril Harris (the
hall’s acoustician), provided a screen at the rear of the stage to throw the
piano’s sound into the auditorium. Horowitz was given two rehearsals.

At the first, Horowitz
tried out many locations, conferring with Wanda from the stage. She and a few
of the invited guests prowled the parquet while Horowitz was playing, and they
contributed their acoustic assessments. Horowitz was happy with the sound from
a particular location, and the spot was duly marked on the stage floor. He was
worried – or pretended to be – about the size of the big house and said to a
critic[12]
at the second rehearsal that he would never be able to fill it. The critic told
Horowitz that he was being childish, and that he was willing to bet every seat
would be taken.

“Bet?” asked Horowitz. “How
much?”

“Fifty dollars?”

They shook hands on the
bet. Of course the hall was filled, and of course Horowitz paid his debt in due
time, and of course the critic never cashed the check, keeping it a souvenir.

The program consisted of
the Clementi Sonata in F sharp minor; Schumann’s Kinderscenen; the Scriabin Sonata No. 5 (new to his repertoire); Chopin’s
Introduction and Rondo in E flat, two mazurkas, and (still once again the
challenge) the Ballade in G minor. For encores, Horowitz played Scarlatti,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Scriabin. The Metropolitan Opera cleared over $100,000
from the recital, of which Horowitz got half.

[…]

Horowitz seemed happy and
pleased with himself. But those happy days were shattered by the news he and Wanda
received on January 10, 1975. Their daughter, Sonia, was found dead in her
Geneva apartment.

18. Sonia

She was a strange child and
I did not understand her. Perhaps I was not so good a father.

– Vladimir
Horowitz to Harold C. Schonberg about Sonia

Sonia’s life had not been happy; and
Wanda, who had a terrible attack of guilt feelings, brooded about her
daughter’s death for a long time. Horowitz too went through a bad period,
though many did not realize this because he never talked about it. In any case,
his mind-set was such that his own routine had to take precedence over
everything else, even the death of his daughter.

Still, it nevertheless was a searing
experience. Twelve years after Sonia’s death, Horowitz and Wanda still found it
painful to talk about it.

[…]

By all accounts, Sonia was a
precocious child, the most intelligent of all the Toscanini grandchildren.
Wanda had a letter from Maestro in which he said he never had a special liking
for any of his children, but among the three grandchildren, he said, “Sonia is
my favorite.”

She might have developed into a good
pianist had she put her mind to it. Rachmaninoff said that Sonia had hands like
Anton Rubinstein’s – a thick palm, spatulate fingers, a wide stretch. In short,
an ideal piano hand. She had a fine musical memory and a superior ear, with a
Toscanini-like ability to hear a single wrong note among a welter of violins. Horowitz’s
cousin, Natasha Saitzoff, staying with the family in Switzerland before the
move to America, came down one morning to hear the four-year-old Sonia singing
themes from the Brahms B flat Concerto. She had been listening to her father
practice it the day before.

[…]

What Sonia did not have, with all of
her obvious intelligence, was application. She never pursued anything all the
way through. She gave up her piano studies as a young teenager. She dabbled in
painting and tried to write poetry, but became bored and dropped those
pursuits. In school she never was a good student. As she grew up the subject
that interested her most was religion, especially comparative religions, about
which she read a great deal.

In her early teens she started to act
up, defiantly smoking, constantly arguing with her parents, and using foul
language. Anybody with experience would have known that all this was a
desperate scream for attention, for help, but her parents did not have
experience.

Sonia’s bid for attention having
failed, the trouble really began. She refused to go to school anymore. Her
parents found her unmanageable. So they sent her to a psychiatrist who
suggested she be put into the George Junior Republic School near Ithaca, New
York. It was a school that worked on the lines of the American republic. It had
a president, a vice president, and the equivalent of a Congress. Everybody in
the school had a vote. Wanda said that the move was “a catastrophe. The school
had the most horrible, disturbed children, and that was not the place for
Sonia.”

But she finished high school there
before going home to live with her parents.

Sonia was a loner. She did make
friends easily and was enthusiastic about them for a while, but she dropped
them just as quickly. Wanda wondered if she ever had any real friends. Perhaps
she sublimated that need in religion.

[…]

At around the age of twenty Sonia
decided she did not want to live in America. “She really didn’t like any place,”
said Wanda. “She couldn’t find any place on this earth.”

[…]

As far as Wanda knew, Sonia never took
drugs, “but she almost lived on sleeping pills and toward the end she started
drinking. Then she stopped drinking. Then she started again.” Wanda realized
she was an unhappy, disturbed young woman but did not know what to do about it:

She remained in contact
with us, and was always angry. She was angry with the French, with the
Italians, with the Americans, with everybody. She couldn’t find peace. She was
extreme in everything. Love and hate – there was no half way. She could weigh
180 pounds and then go down to 130. On January 10, 1975, she was found dead in
her rooms in Geneva. She had taken too many sleeping pills. By accident or
design – nobody will ever know. She couldn’t find peace. She was forty when she
died.

Sonia had wanted to write a biography
of her father, and she discussed the project with Natasha. Of course nothing
came of it. Finally her mental problems were beyond her control. Toward the end
she had trouble articulating her thoughts. She would talk to friends, but
incoherently. Horowitz told Natasha that he believed her motorbike accident in
1957 had caused severe brain damage.

When Sonia died in Geneva, history
repeated itself. Wanda immediately got on a plane, while Horowitz stayed home.
His way of coping with a crisis was to flee from it.

Wanda had brought Sonia to Geneva in
1974, asking the pianist Nikita Magaloff, who lived near there, to look after
her, which he did. Sonia said she wanted to take piano lessons again, and also
wanted to continue her Russian studies. Magaloff put her in touch with a
Russian pianist, Alexis Golovin. She never got around to taking lessons, but
she and Golovin became friends and she would spend much time on the phone with
him, discussing her problems. The main problem seemed to be her father. She
told Golovin that she loved her father but that he had rejected her. She kept
waiting for him to show any desire to see her, any suggestion of love from him.

It never happened.

In Geneva and elsewhere it was
generally believed that Sonia had taken her own life. But there was no evidence
one way or the other. Natasha believed that it was an accidental death from an
overdose of drugs. “If she had wanted to commit suicide she would have done it
long before.”

Wanda returned from Sonia’s funeral in
Milan distraught. One night some friends came to East Ninety-fourth Street to
pay their respects. Horowitz came downstairs and, said Vera Michaelson, a
public relations woman who was a neighbor in Connecticut, where Horowitz and
Wanda had a summer home, it was the first time she had ever seen him haggard, untidy,
looking as though he had not slept for weeks.

Mrs. Michaelson and her husband soon
said they had to leave.

“No,” said Horowitz. “I want to play.”
He went to the piano.

Mrs. Michaelson said that she did not
remember what he played, except that “it was not sad, not funeral music.” Mrs.
Michaelson was looking at Wanda while Horowitz played. “She looked at him with
such tremendous love. She was terribly in love with him at that moment.”
Horowitz played for about two hours. It was a tribute that Sonia would have
appreciated and perhaps even understood.

19.
Travelling à la Paderewski

About two months after Sonia’s death,
Horowitz was once again on the road with Wanda, meeting the rest of his
commitments for the 1974–75 season, during which Horowitz played about twenty
concerts in the United States and Canada. It was the biggest tour he had
undertaken since the 1950s.

If Horowitz had any deep feelings
about Sonia’s death, he managed to hide them very well. And Wanda refused to
talk to the press about Sonia in any detail. Her only comment was that she
thought she would never get over it, but that life must go on. Horowitz made no
statement at all. But he was willing, even eager, to talk about everything
else.

Something new in his relations with
the media was entering Horowitz’s life. Ever since his American debut in 1928
he had been in the public eye, always an object of intense curiosity to the
musical public. But he never gave much of himself in his interviews, constantly
repeating the same old stories – his relationship with Rachmaninoff, his
childhood meeting with Scriabin, and so on. Generally he ended up saying the
same things over and over again, and his observations were never particularly
original or stimulating. In all fairness, this is true of most artists. They
are forced back to the same stories, year after year. After all, they can’t invent new things to say.

But now, all of a sudden, Horowitz
seemed to relish public attention and actively courted the media. He liked to
hear himself talk, and he began to fancy himself a wit, a raconteur. Since he
was not as witty as he seemed to think he was, this actively bothered many of
his admirers. By exposing himself too much, by sometimes coming close to making
a fool of himself, Horowitz lost some of the mystery and awe he had previously
commanded. He began to be known as a character, an eccentric. He not only
relished being a celebrity, he began to try to live up to it, even to the
extent of appearing on television talk shows.

On some of those shows and in press
conferences during the last decade of his life Horowitz often tried to be both
wit and grand seigneur. It was a pose
that did not ring true. Horowitz, unlike Rubinstein, was not cut out to be a grand seigneur. His wisdom – and he
could be very wise – was sometimes clouded by an adolescent quality and a
vanity that could lead him into silly verbal extravagances. His repartee in
press conferences could usually best be described as embarrassing.

And then, in those last decades, there
was his mode of travel, gleefully described by the American press.

He traveled in grand style. In the old
days, that was traditional among superstars. Idols like Adelina Patti,
Paderewski, or Nellie Melba, with their private railway cars, their forty
pieces of luggage, their chefs and servants, delighted the public with their
lavish mode of life. It was part of their mystique, and it became part of
Horowitz’s.

Typical was a 1977 concert in Miami,
which hit all the newspapers. The Horowitz entourage included his wife, his
valet, his secretary, his tuner, his recording engineers, and his cook. His own
piano went along with him. In Miami, Judith Drucker, the local impresario, let
it be known that Horowitz said he would not play unless a supply of fresh gray
sole was on hand. She had it flown from New Bedford, Massachusetts, and it was
delivered to the Horowitz cook so that the fish could be prepared à la
Horowitz. (Naturally any suite in which Horowitz stayed had to have a kitchen.)

Drucker also told the press of other
Horowitz requirements. He demanded blacked-out bedroom windows. There were to
be no calls until noon. He needed a room large enough for two concert grands. A
limousine had to be standing by at all times. Drucker reaped a million dollars’
worth of publicity from the episode. So did Horowitz.

As Horowitz’s manager, Harold Shaw was
the one who had to instruct Drucker – and other impresarios around the country
– on the way to keep the pianist happy. If Horowitz was not happy, Wanda was
unhappy; and if Wanda was unhappy, the entire community would know about it.
Woe betide any local manager who did not meet the Horowitz requirements for
physical well-being, or who failed to sell every seat in the hall. Not that the
latter happened very often.

[…]

The American public read the reports
about Horowitz’s requirements with amusement and even delight. This, by golly,
was the way superstars were supposed
to act.

Was Horowitz spoiled rotten? By normal
standards, yes. But a neurotic genius like Horowitz could not be judged by normal
standards. Two of his business associates had a ready explanation for
Horowitz’s behavior. Peter Gelb, his manager after 1981, explained that
Horowitz “was operating by his own necessities.”

The behavior may have been eccentric,
Gelb said in a long, analytic justification, but it was borne out of “practical
reasoning.” For instance, Gelb said, Horowitz had a habit of not signing a
contract until a month or so before a concert because he did not want to
cancel. “He knew that the only way he could live up to his commitments was by
not making commitments until the last possible moment. He knew enough about
himself to know that he would never know how well he would feel a few months
ahead of time. By limiting his commitments until the last moment he could
fulfill them.” As for the living requirements he expected:

When he demanded special
food and special treatment from his hotel it was in his mind that it was the
only way he could survive. He really thought that. If he didn’t have his water,
if he didn’t have his Dover sole in the period he was having Dover sole, he was
not going to live to the next day. In that sense he was a hypochondriac, but he
really wasn’t being some kind of prima donna. He was being very practical. He
wouldn’t – he couldn’t – play
anywhere unless he had all the things he was accustomed to. It wasn’t a
question of being spoiled. It was something much more basic. Believe me, I have
dealt with spoiled people, and I know. Having the things he need was essential
to him. He couldn’t live without them. And if he couldn’t live he couldn’t play
the piano.

Harold Shaw thought much the same way.
He said that he never found Horowitz personally difficult. Demanding, yes.
Difficult, no. Most great artists who are considered demanding, he believed,
are really not. They need certain things to produce their best work. “His
doctor told him that because of his high blood pressure he had to stretch out
at intermissions, relax, maybe even take a catnap. Horowitz tried it and it
helped him a lot. He needed the sofa that had to be in the artist’s room for
his concerts. He was not being difficult, he was being practical. He needed it
to do his job.”

Shaw had another observation to make,
one that would be backed by all managers: “It is the middle rank of artists who
are difficult. They know that they are never going to make it to the top, and
they can drive you crazy with their incessant complaining and the way they
change their minds from day to day. They blame everybody but themselves that
they are not Vladimir Horowitz, Jessye Norman, or Kathleen Battle.”

In May of 1976 it was going to be the
eighty-fifth anniversary of the opening of Carnegie Hall. The Music-Hall, as it
was originally called, had opened on the corner of Seventh Avenue and West
Fifty-seventh Street on May 5, 1891, thanks to the philanthropy of the steel
magnate Andrew Carnegie, and it had brought Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky from
Russia for the opening night and the ensuing week of concerts. So Julius Bloom,
running the venerable auditorium eighty-five years later, decided to try for a
heroic splash on the order of the 1891 opening. The program he worked out was
advertised as The Concert of the Century.

Perhaps it was. It is hard to think of
another event that brought together such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein
(conducting the members of the New York Philharmonic), Isaac Stern, Yehudi
Menuhin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Mstislav Rostropovich – and Vladimir
Horowitz. Also gracing the scene was the Oratorio Society (which had sung at
the opening night and later that week in 1891).

Horowitz was a prominent participant
in the program. He accompanied Fischer-Dieskau in Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle, played the first
movement of Tchaikovsky’s A minor Trio with Stern and Rostropovich, and the
slow movement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata with Rostropovich. The
Horowitz-Rostropovich collaboration in the Rachmaninoff came about because the
soprano Martina Arroyo canceled at the last minute, whereupon pianist and
cellist volunteered to fill in.

[…]

Toward the end of 1977, on December
26, Horowitz was interviewed at home by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.
Wallace and Horowitz were casual friends. Wanda was an active participant on
the show. There were those who found it embarrassing. Horowitz did not show up
as an intellectual giant. He looked ill at ease, as evidenced by his nervous,
gargled giggle, and he tried too hard to be a regular guy. Wanda was constantly
prompting or correcting him. This was not the kind of publicity Horowitz
needed.

Two years after the anniversary year
of Carnegie Hall came another anniversary, this one more personal. January 12,
1978, marked fifty years since Horowitz had made his American debut with
Tchaikovsky under Beecham in Carnegie Hall. Horowitz celebrated it, almost to
the day, with his first orchestral appearance in twenty-five years. On January
8, 1978, in Carnegie Hall, he played the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 with
the New York Philharmonic conducted by Eugene Ormandy.

Horowitz had said that he would never
again play a concerto, but a golden anniversary is, after all, something special,
and he relented.

[…]

Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center
was the home of the New York Philharmonic, but Horowitz would not play there.
He did not like the acoustics. So the Philharmonic packed up and moved south
for this one concert. It was fascinating for the audience to hear the
Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall for the first time in more than fifteen years.

[…]

The concerto was preceded by
Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and
Symphony No. 7. When Horowitz came out after intermission and played the concerto,
there was pandemonium at its conclusion. Naturally the Horowitz-Ormandy
Rachmaninoff recording was immediately released, in a touched-up version (as
the 1965 return concert had been). But the reviews were mixed.

Something was creeping into Horowitz’s
playing that alarmed some of his admirers. The Times reviewer was unhappy about the self-indulgence of the
performance. It ended up a collection of details, he said. For a few years the Times man had been grumbling about Horowitz’s
increasingly noticeable mannerisms and his concentration on detail to the
detriment of the melodic line. In 1974 he had greeted a Horowitz performance of
Chopin’s G minor Ballade as “mannered and even inexplicable.” There were
further complaints about disjointed playing in 1976: “It seems to be getting more
pronounced as he grows older. A large-scale work ends up episodic.”[13]

Horowitz was entering a bad period,
one in which mannerism took precedence over style. His playing still generated
the old electricity. But it sometimes had something unsettling about it,
something exaggerated, calculated and artificial. The overpronounced rubatos and
tempo fluctuations approached bad taste. Sometimes the rhythm was slack, and
that almost never was characteristic of his previous work. Sometimes the
playing even approached parody, lending support to those who had been claiming
all along that Horowitz distorted a melodic line. There could be no defense
against these charges with the Rachmaninoff performance, for instance. It was
an exhibition of affected sentimentality that had nowhere near the dignity and
integrity of the Coates and Reiner recordings.

Also, for some reason, Horowitz
started having his piano regulated in a peculiar manner. It sounded hard and
bleak, much to the dismay of his technician, Franz Mohr. “In my estimation,”
Mohr said, “it was overbrilliant, but I was not going to argue with Vladimir
Horowitz. Specifically, the piano he used for his performance with Ormandy of
the Rachmaninoff Third. Horowitz got it into his head that he needed more
volume, that he would not be heard over the orchestra, that the instrument [the
famous CD 186 in the Steinway basement, reserved for Horowitz alone] had to be
more brilliant. How do you make a piano more brilliant? You file the hammers
down so there is little felt, and the hammer is more compact.” Then Mohr
lacquered the hammers. He worried about the forthcoming Ormandy performance. He
thought that the piano sounded ugly, and he told David Rubin of Steinway that
he would not take responsibility for the instrument Horowitz was playing.

[…]

On February 26, 1978, Horowitz played
at the White House. It was the first time he had played there since 1931.
Harold Shaw engineered the invitation. He had invited Gretchen Poston, the
social secretary for President and Mrs. Carter, and several White House
officials to one of Horowitz’s Carnegie Hall concerts. There Shaw spoke to
Poston about the possibility of a Horowitz appearance at the White House. An
hour-long concert was proposed. Poston relayed the message to the president, a
music lover who was constantly playing Horowitz records. Carter thought it a
fine idea.

When Horowitz arrived, he went to the
East Room and tried out his piano, which had preceded him to Washington. He was
unhappy with the acoustics and suggested some rugs on the floor. The president
and his wife scurried around, found some carpets, and got on their hands and
knees to push them around, assisted by White House aides. Shaw looked on all
this with amusement. “Where is the press corps? Where are the cameras? What a
story!” he kept saying to himself.

Horowitz played the Chopin B flat
minor Sonata, two Chopin waltzes (C sharp minor and A minor), and the A flat
Polonaise. For encores there were Träumerei,
Rachmaninoff’s Polka de W.R., and his
own Carmen Fantasy with a new coda. Political
figures were present, and also a sizable group of musicians including Eugene
Ormandy, Samuel Barber, and Mstislav Rostropovich. President Carter was
thrilled to have Horowitz in the East Room, and his introductory comments were
from the heart. Horowitz played magnificently. One of his encores, the
Rachmaninoff Polka, charmed
everybody. Horowitz opened the recital with The
Star-SpangledBanner. That was
his idea, and he was very emotional about it.

[…]

The anniversary concerts continued,
around the country and in New York. There were two Carnegie Hall golden jubilee
concerts: March 12 and 19, 1978. There was the usual lineup outside the hall. There
was the usual ticket scandal; about a thousand tickets were unaccounted for.
There was the usual investigation. It turned out that a scalper had managed to
get a large number of tickets. It also was reported in the press that Vera
Stern had provided some three hundred Carnegie Hall benefactors with tickets so
that they would not have to stand in line. Horowitz and Wanda were furious. The
scandal was such that the Carnegie Hall box-office head resigned.

For his golden jubilee concerts
Horowitz brought back the Liszt Sonata in B minor. He also played the Schumann Arabesque, Mozart’s C major Sonata (K.
330), which he had never played, and some Fauré – the Impromptu No. 5 and the
Nocturne No. 13 – also new to his repertoire. There was some Rachmaninoff (the Moments Musicaux in B minor and E flat
minor [Op. 16, Nos. 3 and 2]) and two Chopin polonaises, the C sharp minor
(which he would drop almost immediately) and the inevitable A flat.

Bringing back the long, demanding
Liszt B minor Sonata took some daring on Horowitz’s part. Some years previously
he had told a critic that he was too old to play it anymore. It was for young
men, he said. He no longer had the technique and stamina for it. But nobody
could have guessed that from his blazing jubilee performance. The Horowitz
octaves were functioning as well as ever, the variety of color was all but
blinding, and the piece was held together in a masterly manner.

The way he prepared for the Fauré
pieces was typical. When he looked at music by a composer with whom he was not
too familiar, he did a great deal of preliminary reading. “First of all,” as
reported in the New York Times
magazine to Helen Epstein,

I study the whole composer.
I play everything he wrote. Ensemble music, everything. I play myself – not
listen to recordings. Records are not the truth. They are like post cards of a
beautiful landscape. You bring the post cards home so when you look at them,
you will remember how beautiful is the truth. So I play. I’m a very good sight
reader. The texture of the music talks to me, the style. I feel the music, the
spiritual content of his compositions.

I also know everything
about the composer. I always believe the composer and not what the others write
about him. I read the letters of Fauré, what he was thinking. They gave me the
characteristics of the composer. What he liked in music, what he didn’t like. The
first time I play a new piece of music, I listen. I think there is something
there, something is hidden. I read it again the next day. Then two days I leave
it alone. Then I repeat the third day. Five days. Six days. And then I am in
that music just like I play “Tea for Two.”

[…]

21. Collapse

In 1981 Horowitz left the Shaw
management for Columbia Artists Management, Inc. (CAMI), where he came under
the wing of Ronald Wilford, the CAMI head. Horowitz and Wanda called him “the
barracuda.” It was at this time that Peter Gelb renewed his association with
Horowitz. It came through Wanda, after some delicate negotiations.

[…]

Shaw later said that losing Horowitz
was his own fault. As a member of the Horowitz circle who had dinner with him
and Wanda at least once a week, Shaw had been watching with consternation the
decline of Horowitz’s health. It was the beginning of his medicated period,
where his psychiatrist was giving him drugs that seemed to be detaching him from
reality. Horowitz was gulping down sleeping pills and antidepressants of
enormous potency, and for the first time in his life he was drinking. His
tipple was a large glass of Campari and Cinzano. Wanda called his doctor to
find out what to do about the drinking problem, which was something new in her
experience. “Try to have him drink less,” was his only advice. Wanda said that
she felt like killing him.

Like many others, Shaw honestly
believed that Horowitz could no longer function and would never play again. So,
horrified, he backed away from the situation. Looking back, some years later,
he said that he had no regrets. Indeed, he thought that Peter Gelb was one of
the best things that had ever happened to Horowitz. Gelb was the right man at
the right time, and he got Horowitz into film and television, an area that Shaw
knew little about. “I wouldn’t have done as good a job as Gelb,” he said, “and
I even had a feeling of relief when it was all over between me and Horowitz.
Handling him was a full-time job for several people at once.” The Shaw office
suddenly became a quieter place.

Gelb settled in. There was the
Metropolitan Opera concert of November 1, 1981, to take care of. For this,
Horowitz was preparing two big pieces, Chopin’s F minor Ballade and his first
performance in New York of the Liszt B minor Ballade. (He had just learned the
Liszt piece and had tried it out at one concert during his 1981 tour.) The
concert also was scheduled to be recorded (it was).

There were other things to discuss
with Horowitz that Gelb felt were more important than the concert. He strongly
advised Horowitz to return to Europe, where he had not played for decades.
Horowitz vacillated and went through his usual routine: he was too old, the
trip would take too much out of him, they had forgotten him in Europe, it would
be a disaster.

Gelb persisted, suggesting London as
the beginning of the tour. He dangled an invitation from the Royal Family as
bait; Horowitz would go at the personal invitation of Prince Charles. The Royal
Festival Hall concert would be broadcast on an international television hookup.
Horowitz suddenly became very interested. Gelb flew to London, and things were
quickly arranged. Horowitz would give a benefit concert for the Royal Opera
(which was trying to raise funds for a major renovation), with Prince Charles
the patron of the event.

[…]

The London public was agog. The Royal
Festival Hall concert on May 22, 1982, was Horowitz’s first London appearance
since October 19, 1951. One of the major pieces on his program was the Schumann
Kinderscenen. Horowitz was very
pleased with himself about that choice. He told everybody he had selected it in
honor of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, who were expecting their first child.
He also prepared a surprise: he would play the British national anthem before
his first number.

Also on the program were six Scarlatti
sonatas, Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie and G minor Ballade, and the Rachmaninoff
B flat minor Sonata. His encores were a Chopin waltz, the Rachmaninoff Polka de W.R., and Scriabin’s D sharp
minor Etude. The live broadcast, produced by Gelb and directed by Kirk
Browning, would be simultaneously relayed via satellite to the United States,
Japan, West Germany, and France. (A Sony videocassette of the concert was
shortly made available. It was titled Horowitz
in London: A Royal Concert.)

The benefit brought in over £65,000 for
the Royal Opera. A week later, on May 29, also in Festival Hall, Horowitz gave
another recital, with a somewhat different program. The major changes were the
Fourth Ballade by Chopin and Liszt’s B minor Ballade. But this time there was
no royal hoopla.

The London concert was a critical
success. Many of the reviewers were hearing Horowitz in the flesh for the first
time and reacted in wonderment.

[…]

But to those familiar with his playing
there was a notable deterioration. Horowitz was still under toxic medication,
and one of the by-products of the drugs seemed to be a loss of self-criticism
and judgment. In London it was not as evident as it soon would be, but it was
there. Some pianists noticed it without knowing the reason. The London-based
American pianist Craig Sheppard, in an obituary notice in the London Independent of November 28, 1989, wrote
that the 1982 Horowitz performance of the Rachmaninoff B flat minor Sonata in
the Festival Hall “was a mere shadow of what he had done with the same work in
Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1968…. One missed the lion, the prowess, the
unbelievable tonal control that were the
Horowitzian trademarks of the past.” (This Rachmaninoff performance,
incidentally, was not on the Victor disc of the London concert.) Sheppard, of
course, had no way of knowing about Horowitz’s sad physical condition. What he
did know was that “there will never again be another phenomenon like him.”

When Horowitz returned to America
after London, he prepared to go on tour. By then he was losing physical
control. Horowitz thought he was playing well even when he was having memory
lapses and lack of finger coordination. He seemed not to realize what was happening,
and insisted on going on a tour extending from Philadelphia to Chicago and
Pasadena, ending with his first appearances in Japan.

Wanda knew the tour would be a
disaster and she was strongly against it. Indeed, she was frantic. But she
couldn’t talk him out of it. He was adamant that he play and wouldn’t listen to
anybody. Once he made up his mind he was stubbornly immovable. When Wanda
suggested that he stop his medications and psychiatric sessions, Horowitz blew
up. He told her that it was she who needed mental help. Off on his tour he
went.

[…]

When Horowitz was read a translation
of the reviews [of his Japanese concerts on 11 and 16 June, 1983 – Ed.] after
he returned to New York, he said it was worse than the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
He said he would never play again, and for a while it seemed that he might keep
his promise. He didn’t appear in public for a year after that. Critics
everywhere wondered if the great career had come to an end. A newspaperman
visited Horowitz at home and was shaken by what he saw. Horowitz was in
deplorable shape. He had put on much weight, his belly hung over his belt, he
was unable to talk coherently. No interview was possible under the
circumstances. “He moved like a zombie,” said a friend, aghast. Another friend
drew Wanda aside, asked if Horowitz had Alzheimer’s disease. On October 1,
1983, Ronald Wilford gave him a birthday party for a close circle of friends.
The eighty-year-old Horowitz sat on a couch, saying very little, looking like a
shriveled old man. People would go up to him to pay homage and walk away
puzzled. Horowitz did not seem in contact with the world. Anybody who came near
him in that distressing period knew that he would never play again.

22.
Resurrection

For a while nothing was heard of
Vladimir Horowitz. There was a total blackout on East Ninety-fourth Street. Not
even Horowitz’s closest associates – neither Peter Gelb, nor Jack Pfeiffer, nor
Ronald Wilford, nobody – had the faintest of what was going on behind those closed
doors. Vladimir Horowitz became the forgotten man.

But suddenly, unexpectedly, around
March 1985, Gelb got a phone call from Horowitz and went to see him. He was
impressed with what he saw. Horowitz looked almost like his own self. He was
off all medications, felt much better, and – surprise of surprises – had
decided to play again.

Not much is known about his recovery.
Those involved with it have refused to talk, especially Giuliana Lopes, the
person who by all accounts did the most to pull him through. Mrs. Lopes had
been engaged in 1959 to be Sonia’s companion. After Sonia’s death she found
herself back in the Horowitz household as the maestro’s companion.

Mrs. Lopes, married to an engineer at
RCA Records, became Horowitz’s confidante. She knew more about him than anybody
except Wanda. Perhaps more. He leaned on her and confided to her all of his problems.
She cooked for him, traveled with him, became his prop. Mrs. Lopes always
refused to be interviewed. She felt that the relationship between herself and
Horowitz should forever remain private.

[…]

When Horowitz summoned Gelb, it was to
discuss the future. Horowitz said he was old, had just recovered from severe
emotional and physical problems, and did not yet have the strength for
concerts. How could he get started again?

Gelb proposed the idea of a film to be
shot in the Horowitz living room. It would be a documentary made over the
course of a month. Thus Horowitz would have the chance to ease himself back.

[…]

After a while Horowitz loved making
the show. He started kidding around and enjoying himself. When the filming was
over – it took six shooting days, starting on April 24, 1985, but spread out
over a longer time – he was confident he could return to concert life. In the
film Horowitz did some talking and Wanda was very much in evidence. When the
film was completed, it was entitled Vladimir
Horowitz: The Last Romantic and was released by MGM.

At the beginning of the filming Gelb
alerted RCA and Columbia to the fact that Horowitz was back in form. No one in
those two companies believed him and would not even send anybody to
Ninety-fourth Street to listen. So Gelb picked up the phone and called Gunther
Breest, at that time the artists and repertoire director for Deutsche
Grammophon records in Germany. “Here’s your chance. You always wanted
Horowitz,” he said. Breest got on the next plane and immediately signed
Horowitz to a contract for the sound track recording of the film.

It is a fascinating film, as much for
the portrait of the Horowitz personality as for his playing. He was dressed in
a dark business suit with a red polka-dot bow tie and matching handkerchief
coyly peeping from his breast pocket. He was relaxed, happy, and charming. For
the most part his comments were natural-sounding as he rambled on in a
stream-of-consciousness manner about his early life and whatever else came to
mind. “I can play still! I can play still!” he kept on exultantly repeating. At
the keyboard he can be heard noodling a bit, and among his noodles are a few
measures from Stars and StripesForever and Tea for Two. He loftily dismissed the occasional wrong note that
could be heard. “I don’t want perfection. I’m not Heifetz. I’m Horowitz.”

Occasionally he prattled a bit too
much and his cutesy side was rather adolescent (though in a peculiar sort of
way that was part of his charm because it was so innocently transparent). He
said he could give a Carnegie Hall concert the following week if he had to. Then
he went into his innocence act. Would anybody come? Would people have forgotten
him? He and Wanda, who was very much a part of the film, engaged in a bit of
badinage, she as sharp and contentious as always. By now the two of them had
made peace with each other. Franz Mohr, Jack Pfeiffer, and some members of the
filming team are also on camera. Everybody walks on eggs, catering to Horowitz,
assuring him that he is wonderful, wonderful.

And often the playing in this film is wonderful. The old color is back, the
fingers are still the commander of the keys, and above all there is none of the
mannered, neurotic playing of a few years back. Some of the shorter pieces –
the Rachmaninoff, the Scriabin etude – are pristine Horowitz. The A flat
Polonaise has drive and power, the Mozart simplicity and grace. Only in the B
minor Scherzo is there a feeling of struggle. It is a peculiar conception,
rather small scaled with very little pedal, and it sounds like an incomplete
statement.

[…]

Considering what Horowitz had been the
previous year and what he now was doing, it can be considered something of a
miracle. It marks the beginning of the glorious playing of his last five years.
There was no evidence of the nervous tension that had been one of the marked
characteristics of his style. The last period was much simpler and purer. Horowitz
gave the impression of enjoying his playing, of being utterly relaxed. It was
ripe music making of infinite nuance: relaxed, simple and natural, sweet and
singing.

After the film was completed, Horowitz
got in touch with Frost and said he was going to make studio recordings again.
Would Frost be the producer? Of course. Which meant that Breest and Deutsche
Grammophon Gesellschaft also got the next three records Horowitz made, which
were among the best-selling records in the history of classical music. Several
million copies were purchased. Breest eventually left Deutsche Grammophon for
Sony/CBS Records, and Horowitz went with him. That is why the very last disc
Horowitz ever made was issued on the Sony Classical label in April 1990, about
five months after his death.

[…]

In 1985 the German critic Joachim
Kaiser, who had written an important book on twentieth-century pianists, came
to New York to interview Horowitz during several of the Deutsche Grammophon studio
sessions, and also to provide the program notes for the ensuing compact disc,
which contained Schumann’s Kreisleriana,
the Schubert-Tausig Marche militaire,
and short pieces by Liszt, Scriabin, and Schubert.

Kaiser was in awe and not a little
frightened. “After all, he’s said to be as withdrawn as Garbo, deified as Liszt.”
No such thing. Kaiser found “a delightful old gentleman” eager to engage in
conversation. He watched Horowitz warm up, indulging “his sense of fantasy,”
playing some Scriabin and Liszt, “insouciantly combining three Schubert
impromptus with the Wanderer Fantasy.”
Horowitz then settled down to Schumann’s Kreisleriana:

As he says himself – and
demonstrates – he used to play Kreisleriana
too fast. Now the passages of twilight lyricism seem to have become his
favorites. And now he conceives the middle section of the first piece much more
beautifully and poetically. There may be a hint of a Schumann-Eichendorff Lied
buried there. I allowed myself to point it out to the maestro: the first line
of Auf einer Burg is “Eigenschlafen
auf der Lauer.” Suddenly Horowitz switches to German to give me the second
line, “oben ist der alte Ritter.” (I wonder if any young German Schumann
players know their Eichendorff so well.)

After the end of the film and the
resumption of recording, Horowitz felt stimulated. He took the summer off and
it was agreed that he would perform in Europe in the fall. Two recitals in
Paris and another two in Milan were arranged. Horowitz would be playing in
Paris for the first time in thirty-four years, and in Milan for the first time
in a half century.

[…]

On November 15, 1985, The Last Romantic was shown in Carnegie
Hall. Horowitz did not attend. Had he done so, it would have been the first
time in history that a pianist attended his own recital as a member of the
audience.

[…]

23.
Globetrotter

[…]

After leaving Germany for a successful
appearance in London, Horowitz spontaneously decided to play in Tokyo. He felt
that he was on a roll, playing well, and he very much wanted to redeem his
reputation after the 1983 disaster.

This time the Japanese public was
wary. The concerts nevertheless sold out. In Tokyo Horowitz went so far as to
apologize for 1983, saying that he had drunk too much, eaten too much, and
taken too many sleeping pills.

In Japan, Horowitz played the same
program he had recently presented in Leningrad and Germany. The concert, on
June 22, 1986, was given in a hall on the campus of the Showa Women’s
University in western Tokyo. Horowitz had made up his mind so quickly to play
in Tokyo that it was impossible to get a hall in any central site. “So rushed were
recital preparations,” reported Clyde Haberman for the New York Times, “that programs also were not
available until the intermission.”

As soon as he started playing,
everybody realized that this was not the Horowitz of 1983. His old electricity
galvanized the audience. He was repeatedly called back after his final piece,
and played three encores, after which there were eight curtain calls. Backstage,
wrote Haberman, Horowitz was tired but happy. He felt that he had played well.

When the reviews appeared, they were
ecstatic. Hidekazu Yoshida of the Asahi
Shimbun, who in 1983 had called Horowitz “a cracked antique”, now called
him “a magician.” All the critics expressed amazement over the Horowitz “revival.”
Horowitz was content; he had indeed rehabilitated himself. His general behavior
this time was different too. Instead of sulking in his hotel room he went
shopping and even went out for dinner although, Haberman reported, “he has
stayed safely to his preferred died of sole and chicken. The only Japanese fare
he is known to have sampled is tea.”

On his return to America in the fall
of 1986 Horowitz gave a few concerts, including an appearance at the White
House on October 5, 1986. This even made front-page news when Horowitz was
upstaged by Mrs. Reagan. While the president was describing the pianist’s harsh
life in Russia during the Revolution, Mrs. Reagan inadvertently moved the legs
of her chair over the edge of the small platform that serves as a stage in the
East Room, and she toppled into the audience, landing at the feet of former
ambassador to Great Britain Walter H. Annenberg. There was a gasp and everyone
rushed to the rescue. She was not injured and laughingly walked back on the
platform, to be embraced by Horowitz. “That’s the reason I did this,” she told
the audience. The president quipped, “Honey, I told you to do it only if I didn’t
get any applause.”

The East Room of the White House was
crowded with musicians, diplomats, and politicians. Horowitz was being honored
not only as a musician but also as a cultural ambassador who was helping to
improve relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Ambassador Hartman was there. So were
Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States; George P. Schulz, the
American secretary of state; Zubin Mehta, Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma, assorted
pianists great and small, heads of great libraries and museums, philanthropists,
administrators – in short, the cream of the American cultural establishment.

The audience heard music that Horowitz
had played in Moscow: Mozart’s Sonata in C (K. 330); Liszt’s Sonetto 104 del Petrarca and the
Schubert-Liszt Soirée de Vienne No.
6; two Chopin mazurkas and two etudes by Scriabin; Schumann’s Träumerei and Moszkowski’s Etincelles. He was in good form,
exhibiting his sensitively spun and unabashedly Romantic Mozart, and having fun
with the other works on the program. As always, it was the virtuoso pieces that
brought down the house. There were smiles and nudges after his elegant
performance of the delicious Schubert-Liszt Soirée,
which Horowitz ended with a stylish cadenza of his own; and the fleetness and
accuracy of the prestissimo scales in Etincelles
had everybody cheering.

Back in New York, Horowitz worked hard
on a record that was to contain Schubert’s big B flat Sonata, the Mozart Rondo in
D and B minor Adagio, Schubert’s Momentmusical in F minor, and the Schubert-Liszt
Ständchen and Soirée de Vienne No. 6. Frost edited the tape and brought it to
Horowitz, who turned it down. He told Frost that his concept of the Mozart
pieces and the Schubert B flat Sonata had changed while he was making the
record. Especially the Mozart; he suddenly got new ideas about Mozart
embellishments, he said, and would have to revise his thinking. The Schubert
Sonata he found too fussy, and the only things he liked were the Ständchen, Soirée, and Moment musical.
Those three pieces ended up in a disc, Horowitz
at Home, released about three years later. Late in 1991 the rejected
Schubert B flat Sonata shared a compact disc (named Horowitz the Poet) with the 1987 Vienna performance of Schumann’s Kinderscenen. (The Schubert should not
have been released; Horowitz was right in calling it too fussy, and its
appearance was a disservice to his memory.)

[…]

After he repeated the same program in
Hamburg on June 21, 1987, Horowitz returned home. He was to live almost two and
a half years more, and he had plans for returning to Europe, but it was not to
be. The Hamburg concert was his last appearance anywhere as a recitalist.

In New York, Horowitz resumed work on
the Deutsche Grammophon series. These late recordings were in many respects probably
the best he ever made. They are signing, beautiful, and relaxed. Here virtuoso
and musician come into perfect balance. There no longer are the neuroticism,
athleticism, and demonism that had long characterized his playing. Everything
is simple and natural. Mozart suddenly occupies an honored place in his
repertoire. Horowitz also had always loved Haydn, and his very last disc took a
look at a lovely, witty Haydn sonata that he had never previously played.

Horowitz was wise enough to realize
that he could no longer be the thundering virtuoso, and he avoided large-scale
pieces in the last years of his life, choosing his recorded repertoire very
carefully. Aside from Schumann’s Kreisleriana,
he kept away from anything that would tax him physically. The celebrated
electricity was still present, but not with the voltage of previous years.
Instead there was gentleness, an infinite variety of sound and flexibility of
rhythm, a singing color world in which conception, ear, feet, and finger worked
together in perfect, artistic harmony. It was a new Horowitz, and if he was not
as stunning as before, the rewards – as critics all over the world were quick
to point out – were perhaps greater.

25. Mozart
and “Liebestod”

Horowitz had been thinking about a
concerto recording for well over a year, and early in 1987 he discussed
repertoire with friends. He talked about Liszt’s E flat. He said he might pair
it with the Chopin F minor. Or maybe Liszt’s A major Concerto, which he adored.
He even spoke about the Saint-Saëns C minor Concerto. But he ended up with the
A major Mozart (K. 488). Horowitz had never played K. 488 in public but was not
unfamiliar with it. In 1939 he learned the work when he was going to play it at
the Lucerne Festival with Toscanini, but at the last minute it was replaced by
the Brahms Second.

Recording sessions for the Mozart were
arranged. The locale would be La Scala [sic: Abanella Studio – Ed.], Milan, in
March 1987.

Since 1985, Horowitz had been having a
great love affair with Mozart. In his old-age look at Mozart, Horowitz,
knowingly or unknowingly, was experiencing what the great Italian-German
pianist Ferruccio Busoni had experienced in the final years of his life. Busoni, famous for his Bach,
Beethoven and Liszt, suddenly turned to Mozart, giving series of the concertos
in a day when most of them were unknown.

[…]

Wanda unbelievingly watched Horowitz
get the concerto ready for Milan. He did very little work on it. No more than
an hour a day once or twice a week, she said, and that was in February for a
session coming up in less than a month. She did not know how he could get it
into his fingers in so short a time with so little practice, but on this
occasion she underestimated the old pro. Horowitz knew how to pace himself. And
besides, this was a recording session, not a concert. He could have the sheet
music in front of him.

[…]

In March, Horowitz went to Milan to
make his record, which contained the last of the few concertos he ever
recorded. Instead of another concerto to go with the Mozart, Horowitz finally
decided to play Mozart’s Sonata in B flat (K. 333). Conductor and orchestra
were Carlo Maria Giulini and the Scala Orchestra of Milan.

Not many orchestras or major
conductors had been available on such short notice. Milan was selected because
the Scala was available. Giulini came into the picture because he was a major
conductor and he too was available because he spent most of his time at home with
his ailing wife. He would no longer travel, and he lived near Milan, so he
would have no problem going home after the recording sessions. Normally a
concerto session with any pianist other than Horowitz would take two days at
most. With Horowitz and his frequent rest breaks, it might take ten days, and
the world’s top busy conductors would not give up that much time. Giulini
could. Horowitz and Giulini were on good terms, and Horowitz felt that Giulini
would not fight him and his free way of playing Mozart.

[…]

The performance was filmed as well as
recorded, and the film cassette was a best-seller. It had its premiere at
Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival on October 8, 1987. Like The Last Romantic, it was a Peter Gelb
Production directed by the Maysles documentary team – Albert Maysles, Susan
Froemke, and Charlotte Zwerin. The music was punctured by some on-screen talk
by Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz. Wanda was in good form. There was one shot of her
listening to European music critics quizzing Horowitz. “Always the same
questions,” she mutters, with a disgusted look. At the end of the film she was
asked what she thought of the performance. She looked at the questioner
unbelievingly. “Do you want me to say that I don’t like how he played?”

[…]

Early in 1989 Thomas Frost recorded
what was released as the Horowitz at Home
album. It contained some Mozart, including the B flat Sonata (K. 281), which
was new to the Horowitz repertoire, and also the three Schubert-Liszt pieces
from the discarded 1986 recording – Ständchen
and the Soirées Nos. 6 and 7.[14]
The Mozart sings and dances, and the Liszt arrangements are among the greatest
of their kind in recorded history. This combination of relaxed control, linear
independence (in the Ständchen), pure
song, long-arched phrases, and blinding colors makes the playing unique, even
for Horowitz.

For a few months after the completion
of the disc Horowitz took it easy. He hardly touched the piano at all, at least
during the day. Virginia Bach, who worked there at that time as a sort of
assistant – keeping his music in shape, seeing that he signed his autograph
pictures, sorting his mail, doing some light bookkeeping – was herself a
pianist and was dying to hear him play. But, she said, he never touched the
piano during the first few months she was there.

It was only when he started thinking
about a new recording that he worked a little bit. Around the end of August
1989, he was going through the repertoire for what turned out to be his last
recording. Mrs. Bach never heard him play scales or any kind of exercise. He
would just play through the music, occasionally stopping and repeating a
phrase. He never played any single piece more than five times. Usually it was
only three.

[…]

The disc consisted of music Horowitz
had never publicly played in America. His original idea was to play only Haydn
and Chopin. But he changed his mind. He did start out, as planned, with Haydn
and Chopin, recording the Haydn Sonata No. 49 in E flat and Chopin’s Etudes in
A flat and E minor (Op. 25, Nos. 1 and 5), Mazurka in C minor (Op. 56, No. 3),
Nocturnes in E flat (Op. 55, No. 2) and B (Op. 62, No. 1), and the
Fantaisie-Impromptu.

But after the second session he told
Frost: “You are going to be very surprised. I found something better to end the
record with than the Fantasy-Impromptu.” He had been looking through volumes of
Liszt because he was unhappy with the Chopin. He felt he needed a bigger ending,
and he looked again at the Liszt arrangement of the Liebestod, on which he had worked with Halim [his last pupil –
Ed.]. “That’s the perfect ending!” In a few days he had the piece entirely in
his fingers, and it was made the ending of his record. It turned out to be
symbolic. He also found a little-played Liszt work, the Praeludium to Bach’s
cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.
Liszt later composed a large-scale set of variations on the cantata theme that
sometimes is heard, but the short, highly chromatic, dark-colored, intense
Praeludium was a complete novelty to most.

Usually Horowitz asked for two
sessions a week, two hours each session. Frost, the producer of the record for
CBS/Sony, figured that the sessions would last about three weeks before
Horowitz was satisfied. But, as he wrote in a Times piece on April 11, 1990, on occasion of the disc’s release, “this
time, however, he was driven by some mysterious source of energy that made him
eager to complete the recording in a couple of weeks. He was back on his old
three sessions a week, having wonderful time, enjoying himself.” He was more
energetic than Frost had seen him for a long time. And he was looking forward
to attending the Traviata performance
that his new friend Carlos Kleiber would conduct at La Scala on December 5.
Then there were the two recitals he planned to give in Berlin and Hamburg in
mid-December.

The recording took six sessions in a
period of twelve days. The last session took place on November 1. Four days
later Horowitz was dead.

26.
Artist-As-Hero

Vladimir Horowitz died instantly at
his home on Sunday, November 5, 1989, at about 1 P.M. The medical report said
that his eighty-six-year-old heart had just stopped beating.

There had been no indication that
anything was basically wrong with Horowitz’s health. He had always taken care
of himself. His diet was Spartan, he did not smoke or drink, he walked his mile
or two each day, and shortly before his death he had a medical checkup at which
he was assured that he was in fine shape.

[…]

Musicians around the world were asked
to talk or write about Horowitz, and for several months magazines were full of
articles and interviews. All, inevitably, made the point that an era had come
to an end. One of the more sensitive and thoughtful assessments came from
Vladimir Feltsman:

When I learned from that
day’s television broadcasts that he died, it hit me, but somehow I was asking
myself why I did not feel any real sadness. Of course I felt sorry for Wanda
and for all of us, but why wasn’t I sorry for Horowitz? I realized that his
life as a musician, despite all the complications, was an extremely lucky one.
He was born to play the piano, he got all possible fame in the world he lived
in, he lived a long life, he rediscovered Mozart, he went back to his
motherland, and the circle of his life was complete. He had fulfilled himself. It
was the happy life of an artist, and I can only wish all of us to have this
sort of life. He left a legacy. His sound is here and it is still floating,
somewhere above us.

[…]

Horowitz remained the archetype of the
Romantic pianist, his name still a legend to all pianists and the public, the
most potent and electrifying virtuoso of the twentieth century, the musician
with the strongest, most individual personality, a reincarnation of the
nineteenth-century artist-as-hero.

He was unique, the last of his kind; and
when he died there was nobody to replace him. In his day, in his way, he was,
as the Countess d’Agoult had said of Liszt 150 years before, the only one.

[1] This does not seem to be
correct. VH’s first concerts after the 1983-84 breakdown were in the end of
1985, on 26 October and 2 November in Paris
(Théâtre des Champs-Elysées) and on 17 and 24 November in Milan (La Scala). There was also a recital in
New York
(Carnegie Hall) on 15 December. No London
appearance during that time has turned up. See The Horowitz Website. Ed.

[2] A little earlier, in
February and March 1986, VH had made his famous recording of this piece. It was
released in 1989 on the Horowitz at Home
album. Ed.

[4] The Leningrad concert has been released on CD by
Palexa. Despite the wretched sound, it does confirm VH’s words that he played
better there than he did in Moscow.
Ed.

[5] In Russian: Первый Симфонический
Ансамбль. Ed.

[6] Ravel must have been, like
Grieg, another “adolescent crush”, although it continued until 1940. VH’s
Ravelian repertoire included “Scarbo” from Gaspard
de la Nuit, the Sonatine, Jeax d’eau,
“Alborada del gracioso” and “Oiseaux tristes” from Miroirs and Pavane pour une
infante defunte. What a pity that nothing of this was ever recorded! Ed.

[7] What a missed opportunity!
It’s difficult not to wonder what kind of idiots worked at Victor. It’s
understandable if they put the commercial value of a recording first, but
that’s beside the point. Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto with VH would have been
a guaranteed best-seller. One needs no benefit of hindsight to draw the
conclusion. Ed.

[8] VH turned 22 on 1 October 1925, that
is shortly after his leaving “the Motherland”. Ed.

[10] This is not an
exaggeration. The first recording of the Dante
Sonata was made in 1940 by Louis Kentner, and that was not the original version
but an arrangement for piano and orchestra by Constant Lambert made for a
ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton. The first recording of the original
was made in 1945 by György Sandor. See the liner notes by Marina and Victor
Ledin to this Naxos
edition. Ed.

[11] See note 6. Ed.

[12]No doubt Mr
Schonberg himself. Ed.

[13]Mr Schonberg
is quoting himself in this paragraph. Ed.

[14] Not entirely correct, of
course. The three rejected pieces were two Schubert-Liszt and one Schubert (the
Musical moment), as correctly pointed out earlier by Mr Schonberg himself. The
third Schubert-Liszt piece, Soirée de
Vienne No. 7, was recorded in 1988/89. There are a few similar (and minor)
inaccuracies more, but I have not taken the trouble to correct them. Ed.